^RT 


THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 
OF  CALIFORNIA 

LOS  ANGELES 

IN  MEMORY  OF 
MRS.  VIRGINIA  B.  SPORER 


SCEPTICISMS 


BOOKS  BY  CONRAD  AIKEN 

EARTH  TRIUMPHANT 

TURNS  AND  MOVIES 

THE  JIG  OF  HORSLIN 

NOCTURNE  OF  REMEMBERED  SPRING 

THE  CHARNEL  ROSE 

THE  HOUSE  OF  DUST 

SCEPTICISMS 


SCEPTICISMS 

NOTES  ON 
CONTEMPORARY  POETRY 


CONRAD  AIKEN 


>{£W  TORK 
ALFRED  '  A  '  KNOPF 

MCMXIX 


COPYRIGHT,  1919,  BY 
ALFRED  A.  KNOPF,  INC. 


FEINTED    IN    THE    UNITED    STATES    OP   AMERICA 


College 
Library 
IV 

'    I] 


To 
MT  WIFE 


CONTENTS 

I     APOLOGIA  PRO  SPECIE  SUA  1 1 
II     THE  MECHANISM  OF  POETIC  INSPIRA- 
TION 32 

III  POETRY  IN  AMERICA  48 

IV  THE   Two  MAGICS:  EDGAR  LEE  MAS- 

TERS 65 

V     THE  FUNCTION  OF  RHYTHM  :  FORD  MA- 

DOX    HUEFFER  76 

VI     THE  LITERARY  ABBOZZO:  LOLA  RIDGE       85 
VII     THE  MELODIC  LINE:  D.  H.  LAWRENCE      91 
VIII     POSSESSOR  AND  POSSESSED:  JOHN  GOULD 

FLETCHER  105 

IX     THE      TECHNIQUE      OF      POLYPHONIC 

PROSE:  AMY  LOWELL  115 

X     POETRY    AS    SUPERNATURALISM  :     WIL- 
LIAM STANLEY  BRAITHWAITE  126 

XI     ROMANTIC      TRADITIONALISM:      ALAN 

SEEGER  133 

XII     A      POINTLESS      POINTILLIST:        EZRA 

POUND  136 

XIII  POETIC  REALISM  :  CARL  SANDBURG  143 

XIV  A  NOTE  ON  THE  EVOLUTION  OF  A  POET  : 

JOHN  MASEFIELD  149 

v£V     THE     HIGHER     VAUDEVILLE:     VACHEL 

LINDSAY  155 

XVI     NEW    CURIOSITY    SHOP   AND   JEAN    DE 

BOSSCHERE  160 


CONTENTS 

XVII  NARRATIVE  POETRY  AND  THE  VESTIGIAL 
LYRIC:  JOHN  MASEFIELD,  ROBERT 
NICHOLS,  FREDERIC  MANNING  170 

XVIII  CONFECTIONERY  AND  CAVIAR:  EDWARD 
BLISS  REED,  JOHN  COWPER  POWYS, 
JOYCE  KILMER,  THEODOSIA  GARRISON, 
WILLIAM  CARLOS  WILLIAMS  178 

XIX     THE  RETURN  OF  ROMANTICISM:  WAL- 
TER   DE     LA    MARE,    JOHN     GOULD 
FLETCHER,  WILLIAM  ROSE  BENET        187 
XX    THE  MORTALITY  OF  MAGIC:     ROBERT 

GRAVES,  ROY  HELTON,  NEW  PATHS    193 

XXI  VARIETIES  OF  REALISM:  WILFRID  WIL- 
SON GIBSON,  WILLIAM  ASPENWALL 
BRADLEY,  T.  S.  ELIOT  199 

XXII  AMERICAN  RICHNESS  AND  ENGLISH 
DISTINCTION  :  RALPH  HODGSON,  HAR- 
OLD MONRO,  WALTER  DE  LA  MARE  206 

XXIII  POETS  AS   REPORTERS:   EDITH  WYATT, 

RICHARD  BUTLER  GLAENZER,  CHRIS- 
TOPHER MORLEY;  A  TREASURY  OF 
WAR  POETRY  216 

XXIV  SUNT  RERUM  LACRIMAE:  CHINESE  PO- 

ETRY 224 

XXV     Vox — ET  PRAETEREA  :  MAXWELL  BODEN- 

HEIM  232 

XXVI     PHILOSOPHY  FOR  THE  FLUTE:  ALFRED 

KREYMBORG  240 

XXVII     AMY  LOWELL  AS  CRITIC  251 

XXVIII     THE    IVORY    TOWER:    Louis  UNTER- 

MEYER  AS  CRITIC  258 

XXIX     MAGIC  OR  LEGERDEMAIN?  272 

XXX     APPENDIX:  A  NOTE  ON  VALUES  281 

SELECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY  297 


Apologia  Pro  Specie  Sua 


IT  has  not  been  my  intention,  in  the  pages 
which  compose  this  book,  to  deal  compre- 
hensively with  contemporary  poetry,  nor 
even,  for  that  matter,  to  deal  exhaustively  with 
that  part  of  it  which  I  have  touched  at  all.  That 
sort  of  study  has  seldom  attracted  me.  It  has 
been  my  aim  rather  to  deal  only  with  the  most 
interesting  aspects  of  contemporary  poetry,  and 
to  do  so  in  a  manner  which  might  provoke  and 
stimulate  not  only  the  casual  reader  but,  odd  as 
it  may  seem,  the  unfortunate  poet  himself.  Any- 
body must  have  been  aware,  as  I  point  out  repeat- 
edly in  the  following  pages,  of  the  fact  that  the 
present  poetic  era  is  one  of  uncertainty,  of  con- 
fusion and  conflict.  New  ground  has  been  broken 
in  a  good  many  directions,  or  ground  which,  if  not 
new,  has  been  at  any  rate  so  long  unused  as  to 
have  that  appearance,  at  least,  and  to  inspire  a 

DO 


SCEPTICISMS 

certain  amount  of  scepticism  as  to  the  resultant 
crops;  and  it  has  been  engagingly  natural,  under 
these  circumstances,  that  each  poet  should  claim 
the  most  astounding  properties  for  his  own  plot  of 
soil,  and  become  a  little  wilfully  cynical  as  to  the 
claims  of  his  rivals.  No  one  would  expect  much 
praise  of  Masefield  or  Abercrombie  or  Gibson  at 
the  hands  of  the  Imagists,  for  example,  nor,  on 
the  other  side  should  one  hope  for  much  gratuitous 
enthusiasm  over  the  Imagists  or  Others  from,  let 
us  say,  Frost  or  Masters.  Those  poets  who,  like 
myself,  are  critics  of  poetry  as  well,  have  had  an 
almost  unfair  advantage  in  this  situation.  They 
have  been  able  to  articulate  their  particular  theo- 
ries, to  argue  for  them  in  the  public  forum.  It 
was  a  perception  of  the  advantages  of  this  sort  of 
propaganda  which  drew  the  Imagists  together  un- 
der a  somewhat  specious  symbol,  and  persuaded 
them  to  write  prefaces  in  which  the  self -conscious- 
ness of  the  authors  was  just  a  trifle  shrill,  just  a 
shade  too  "Noli  me  tangere" ;  it  was  a  perception 
of  the  same  thing  that  suggested  to  Alfred  Kreym- 
borg  and  others  the  uses  of  a  periodical  of  their 
own,  in  which  the  nimble  word-jugglers  and  sensa- 
tion-balancers of  that  group — if  it  can  be  called  a 
group — might  juggle  to  their  hearts'  content,  care- 

CM 


APOLOGIA 

less  of  ceiling  or  sky,  and  happily  aware  of  a  cer- 
tain amount  of  audience;  it  was  the  same  percep- 
tion, finally,  which  has  led  Ezra  Pound,  Louis 
Untermeyer,  John  Gould  Fletcher,  Maxwell  Bo- 
denheim,  Miss  Harriet  Monroe,  Miss  Amy  Lowell, 
and  myself, — among  others, — to  write,  first  and 
last,  a  good  deal  of  criticism  of  poetry.  We  have 
all  pretended  pretty  much,  of  course,  in  these 
cases,  to  write  judicially.  Our  utterances  are 
apt  to  sound  authoritative  and  final.  But  do  not 
be  deceived !  We  are  no  surer  of  ourselves  at  bot- 
tom than  anybody  else  is.  We  are,  in  fact,  half 
the  time,  frightened  to  death. 


ii 

Frightened  to  death,  I  mean,  precisely  of  each 
other.  .  .  .  No  one,  I  daresay,  who  is  not  himself 
in  the  game,  would  guess  this.  The  usual  opinion 
of  us  is  that  when  we  are  not  rolling  our  eyes  to- 
ward heaven  in  fine  frenzies  we  are  rather  a  san- 
guinary lot,  spoiling  for  fights  in  sheer  love  of 
bloodshed.  When  I  am  seen,  for  example,  assail- 
ing Mr.  Untermeyer,  or  Mr.  Untermeyer  is  seen 
assailing  Mr.  Fletcher,  or  Miss  Lowell  is  seen 
assailing  me,  the  usual  observation  is  simply  to  the 

PS 


SCEPTICISMS 

effect  that  "poets  are  certainly  a  vain  and  con- 
tentious lot  of  cockatoos."  Well,  vain  enough  we 
are,  in  all  conscience;  but  I  do  not  think  we  are 
by  nature  contentious.  The  fact  is  that  we  are 
simply,  as  I  said,  afraid — mortally  and  secretly 
afraid. 

The  reasons  for  this  should  be  clear  enough  to 
any  one  who  will  give  his  imagination  to  it  for  a 
moment.  What  we  are  afraid  of  is  the  competi- 
tion :  a  factor  which  few  people  are  apt  to  consider 
in  connection  with  the  success  or  failure  of  an  ar- 
tist, but  one  which  is  always  in  considerable  degree 
present,  and  which  at  the  moment,  as  at  all  other 
moments  of  artistic  recrudescence,  is  extremely  im- 
portant. The  competition  among  poets  in  this 
country  just  now  is,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  severe  to 
the  point  of  deadliness.  Not  merely,  I  mean,  in 
the  effort  to  secure  publishers  and  publicity, 
though  few  enough,  truly,  achieve  even  that 
much;  but  more  importantly  in  the  next  stage, 
when,  having  secured  a  certain  indispensable 
amount  of  recognition,  the  poet  begins  to  exert 
himself  in  the  most  audacious  and  exhausting  task 
of  his  life,  namely,  to  convince  himself,  his  public, 
and  his  fellow-poets  that  there  is  nothing  acci- 
dental about  his  success,  that  his  work  has  about  it 

[143 


APOLOGIA 

a  certain  uniqueness  of  distinction  which  should 
commend  it  for  perpetuity,  and  even  that  it  may 
have,  somewhat,  the  qualities  of  greatness.  I  do 
not  wish  to  maintain  that  this  undertaking  is 
wholly  conscious :  but  if  the  poet  is  not  wholly  or 
at  all  times  conscious  of  it,  neither  is  he  wholly  un- 
conscious of  it.  And  it  is  precisely  of  the  ghastly 
possibility  that  his  impression  of  himself  may  be 
wrong,  that  his  undertaking,  and  indeed  his  life, 
— since  the  two  are  nearly  synonymous, — may  be 
only  dust  in  the  nostrils,  that  he  is  so  secretly  and 
so  profoundly  afraid. 

In  these  circumstances,  it  is  entirely  natural  that 
the  poet,  if  he  command  a  decent  prose  style,  or  is 
accustomed  to  the  exactions  of  speech-making, 
should  set  about  hunting  converts.  What  he  is 
going  to  say  is  largely  predetermined.  It  will  be, 
as  it  were,  a  slow  distillation  of  his  temperament 
through  his  reason.  There  will  be  moments  of 
uncertainty  at  the  outset,  moments  when  his  tem- 
perament goes  too  fast  for  him,  and  is  not  properly 
alembricated.  At  such  moments  his  dicta  will 
have  a  little  too  much,  as  he  perceives  later,  the 
air  of  personal  tastes  and  whims,  and  not  suffi- 
ciently the  carved  serenity  of,  let  us  say,  a  poetic 
decalogue.  But  with  time  he  achieves  this  stony 

D53 


SCEPTICISMS 

solidity:  his  pronouncements  increase  in  massive- 
ness  and  weight.  And  many  a  young  head  is 
crushed  beneath  them. 


in 

It  is  not,  however,  the  young  heads  which  most 
attract  his  lithologues :  it  is  rather  the  heads  of  an 
age  with  his  own,  and  those  a  little  older, — those 
that  are  bobbing,  so  to  speak,  for  the  same  crown, 
— which  most  perturb  him.  This  attitude  is  only 
human;  though  one  would  scarcely  expect  most 
poets  to  admit  it  with  much  candour.  If  our  poet 
is,  for  example,  an  Imagist,  who  has  been,  let  us 
say,  pretty  successful  as  a  writer  of  short  lyrics 
in  free  verse,  conspicuous  for  their  coruscations  of 
colour,  their  glittering  edges,  and  conspicuous  also, 
in  a  sense,  for  their  lack  of  conceptual  or  emotional 
elements,  he  will  be  a  trifle  sceptic  about  poetry 
which  is  narrative,  or  philosophic,  or  realistic. 
Let  us  perceive  his  case  with  care:  let  us  sympa- 
thize with  him  profoundly.  He  is,  let  us  say, 
hyperaesthetic,  and  exquisitely  balanced;  extraor- 
dinarily acute  in  his  perceptions  of  sensory  mood, 
miraculously  adept  in  recalling,  without  allowing 
a  single  minute  jewel-particle  of  colour  to  escape, 

D6] 


APOLOGIA 

the  most  evanescently  beautiful  of  the  kaleido- 
scopic patterns  of  sensation  which  fall  together, 
and  fall  apart  again,  in  the  coolness  of  the  mind. 
This  is  his  temperament,  and,  slightly  dimmed, 
this  is  his  poetry.  What  must  he  conclude  when 
he  encounters  a  Spoon  River  Anthology*?  He  is, 
of  course,  shaken  to  his  foundations.  He  has 
found,  beside  his  dwarf  Japanese  garden,  a  foot- 
print which  looks  colossal  merely  because  it  is 
human.  It  signifies,  for  him,  a  world  which  is 
only  too  bewilderingly  huge,  a  world  which  in  his 
secluded  course  of  refinement  on  refinement  he  had 
altogether  forgotten  as  perhaps  containing  the  po- 
tentials of  poetry.  His  first  reaction  is  an  almost 
stupefied  realization  of  the  minuteness  and  deli- 
cacy of  his  own  work.  His  heart  sinks:  he  sur- 
veys this  new  thing  with  a  mixture  of  admiration 
and  terror.  "If  the  world  likes  this,  what  can  it 
find  in  me*?"  But  habit  and  determination  come 
speedily  enough  to  his  rescue, —  he  needn't  have 
been  afraid  for  himself.  His  vanity  has  been 
growing  too  long  and  too  sturdily  to  be  so  easily 
overthrown.  And  his  theory  of  art — which  of 
course  is  antithetical  to  that  behind  the  Spoon 
River  Anthology  —  is  complete. 


SCEPTICISMS 

IV 

The  stage,  then,  is  nicely  set  for  one  of 
those  little  aesthetic  altercations  which  give 
poets  reputations  as  pugilists.  Our  poet  writes 
an  article  on  the  Spoon  River  Anthology. 
Will  it  be  an  unbiassed  article1?  Hardly. 
Too  many  things  are  at  stake  for  him.  The 
article  will  be  honest  enough:  there  will  be 
no  pretence  about  it,  he  will  not  conceal  the  fact 
that  he  admires  the  book  tremendously,  or  that 
he  thinks  it  contains  certain  of  the  qualities  of 
greatness.  But  it  will  not  be  unbiassed.  Di- 
rectly or  indirectly,  from  start  to  finish,  no  matter 
how  far  it  may  appear  to  be  from  the  subject,  it 
will  be  an  impeachment  of  the  artistic  methods 
of  Spoon  River  Anthology  and  a  defence  of  the 
methods  of  the  Imagist.  The  degree  of  intensity 
with  which  this  will  be  done,  and  the  degree  of 
candour,  will  vary.  Our  poet  is  faced  with  alterna- 
tives. Perhaps  his  own  convictions  and  course  are 
slightly  modified  by  the  apparition.  In  this  case 
he  will  admit  the  brilliance  of  it,  but  point  out 
how  much  better  it  might  have  been  had  its  quali- 
ties of  vigour  and  incisiveness  been  more  richly 
fused  with  the  qualities  of  luminosity,  delicacy, 


APOLOGIA 

and  precision.  He  has  found  a  new  ideal :  a  com- 
bination of  divers  new  qualities  with  his  own. 
This  is  a  combination  of  which,  as  a  matter  of 
fact,  he  had  always  been  capable;  but,  quite  by 
accident,  he  has  never  till  now  perceived  it.  .  . 
On  the  other  hand,  if  our  Imagist  is  a  little  more 
limited  as  to  adaptability,  if  he  feels  that  the 
qualities  of  Spoon  River  will  always  be  some- 
what alien  to  him  as  an  artist  (though  he  may  ap- 
preciate them  as  a  reader)  two  courses  of  action 
are  open  to  him.  The  first  will  be  to  ignore 
Spoon  River  completely.  It  will  be  considered 
coarse  and  artless,  its  success  temporary.  He  will 
be  quite  sincere  in  this  opinion.  Or,  on  the  other 
hand,  one  can  conceive  him,  just  as  sincerely, 
lifting  his  voice  in  praise  of  Spoon  River,  in  the 
belief  that  the  success  of  so  different  a  type  of 
work  will  hardly  affect  his  own ;  and  reserving  his 
animosity  for  something  a  little  more  dangerously 
on  his  own  ground. 


It  begins  to  be  seen  how  complex  is  this  life- 
and-death  struggle  among  the  poets.  Our 
Imagist  is  only  one  imaginary  case.  When 

D93 


SCEPTICISMS 

we  recall  that  every  poet  is  at  bottom  just  as  self- 
centred,  just  as  determined  to  achieve  and  per- 
petuate a  sort  of  pre-eminence  for  the  poetic  meth- 
ods which  his  temperament,  or  sensibility,  has 
forced  upon  him,  we  see  into  what  a  pandiabo- 
lorum  we  have  strayed.  We  see  also  how  much 
we  must  be  prepared  to  discount  anything  that 
these  amiable  creatures  start  to  tell  us  about  art. 
Be  they  never  so  entertaining,  be  they  never  so 
grave  and  polite  to  their  rivals,  rest  assured  there 
will  always  be  concealed  somewhere  a  mortal  sting. 
Some  poets  believe  in  employing  the  sting  with 
candour  and  gusto, — some  advocate  that  literary 
executions  should  be  performed  with  an  exquisite- 
ness  of  tact,  that  the  lethal  weapon  should  not  so 
often  be  bullet  or  bludgeon,  or  even  a  moonlit 
blade,  but  rather  the  serpent  in  a  bed  of  roses,  a 
poisoned  perfume.  One  should  not  necessarily, 
I  think,  accuse  the  latter  class  of  poets  of  being 
hypocritical.  The  method  they  choose  is  no  indi- 
cation of  any  timidity,  they  have  no  fear  of  vio- 
lence, nor  would  it  displease  them  to  see  their 
enemies  go  down  under  good  red  blows;  no,  if  they 
choose  the  subtler  and  more  Machiavellian  method 
it  will  be  because  they  believe  it  to  be  the  more 
efficient,  simply.  "See,"  they  seem  to  say,  "how 


APOLOGIA 

essentially  good-natured,  how  candid  and  sweet 
we  are !  Could  any  one,  under  the  circumstances, 
believe  what  we  say  of  X  to  be  anything  but  the 
most  dispassionate  aesthetic  truth*?" — Yes,  this 
method  has  its  advantages,  as  I  have  found.  I 
used  to  be  fond  of  the  good  old-fashioned  sandbag. 
Miss  Lowell  once  rebuked  me  for  this :  she  warned 
me  that  I  might  become  known  as  a  "knocker." 
I  thought  she  was  wrong;  but  since  then  she  has 
published  "Tendencies  in  Modern  American 
Poetry,"  and  I  see  that  she  is  right.  The  sandbag 
is  too  clumsy.  And  silence,  as  Ezra  Pound  can 
testify,  is  just  as  effective. 


VI 

The  situation,  then,  reveals  itself  as  one  to 
curdle  the  blood.  Who  is  to  be  trusted*?  Who 
will  tell  us  what  to  like4?  Who  will  say  "this  is 
false,  this  is  true,  this  is  bad,  this  is  good'"?  Who 
is  there  whom  we  can  follow  with  soft-eyed  confi- 
dence into  the  silences  of  the  arcana*?  The 
answer,  as  should  have  been  foreseen,  is  "No  one." 
We  are  all  unreliable,  all  grinding  our  own  axes. 
About  a  good  many  things,  things  which  do  not 
too  directly  concern  us,  we  can  tell  you  the  un- 


SCEPTICISMS 

varnished  truth.  We  may  be  pretty  reliable  on 
matters  of  aesthetic  fact — most  of  us  would  prob- 
ably tell  you  that  too  many  sibilants  in  the  same 
line  are  to  be  avoided,  that  vowel  sounds  can  be 
combined  so  as  to  make  a  very  pleasant  harmony 
(an  art  which  many  poets  neglect),  that  "The 
Man  with  a  Hoe"  contains  a  good  idea  but  is  a 
lifelessly  written  and  mediocre  poem.  But  the 
instant  we  go  beyond  simple  universals,  distrust 
us!  You  can  be  sure  that  consciously  or  uncon- 
sciously we  are  setting  out  to  poison  whatever 
springs  we  believe  will  flow  down  to  posterity. 
We  are  determined  to  give  those  waters  a  tinge 
of  our  own.  Every  one  of  us  is  secretly  afraid 
that  unless  we  do  this  we  are  doomed  to  oblivion. 
Miss  Lowell's  "Tendencies  in  Modern  American 
Poetry"  says  very  little  of  "Men,  Women,  and 
Ghosts,"  or  "Sword  Blades  and  Poppy  Seed,"  or 
"Can  Grande's  Castle" :  it  is  an  opera  in  which 
the  prima  donna's  voice  is  heard  off-stage  only 
and  fleetingly.  But  it  is  none  the  less  Miss 
Lowell  who  is  the  heroine  of  that  book,  and  it 
is  Miss  Lowell's  poetry  which  that  book  ingen- 
uously and  richly  praises.  Mr.  Untermeyer's 
book,  in  the  same  way,  is  an  oblique  panegyric  of 
Untermeyer:  a  quite  deliciously  nai've  glorifica- 


APOLOGIA 

tion  of  the  temperament  with  which  he  finds  him- 
self endowed.  How  could  it  be  otherwise?  We 
are  not  really  surprised  at  discovering  this, — we 
should  only  be  really  surprised  if  we  came  across 
a  case  to  the  contrary,  if  we  found  Miss  Lowell,  in 
a  fury  of  self-abasement,  making  an  immolation 
of  her  own  works  before  the  altar  of  Ella  Wheeler 
Wilcox,  or  Mr.  Untermeyer  forswearing  poetry 
for  ever  after  reading  T.  S.  Eliot's  "Sweeney 
Among  the  Nightingales."  I  exaggerate  the 
point  for  the  sake  of  emphasis.  I  do  not  mean 
to  suggest  that  both  Miss  Lowell  and  Mr.  Unter- 
meyer do  not  very  often,  momentarily,  escape  the 
prisons  of  their  temperaments  and  pay  their  re- 
spects to  strains  in  contemporary  poetry  which 
they  feel  to  be  inimical  to  their  own.  What  I  do 
mean  is  that  if  you  examine  carefully  the  writings 
of  any  poet-critic  you  will  find,  a  trace  here  and 
a  trace  there,  the  gradual  emergence  of  a  self- 
portrait;  and  one  which  is  only  too  apt  to  be 
heroic  size. 

VII 

This  relativism  dogs  us  even  into  the  lair  of 
the  professional  critic,  the  critic  of  poetry  who  is 
not  himself  a  poet.  In  the  magic  pool  of  art 


SCEPTICISMS 

what  is  it  but  the  flattering  image  of  himself  that 
the  critic  parts  the  leaves  to  see"?  What  indeed 
else  can  he  see?  We  only  perceive  those  things 
to  which  we  are  attuned ;  and  no  matter  therefore 
how  fine  we  spin  a  logic  in  defence  of  our  tastes, 
all  we  do  is  subtilize  the  net  of  our  temperament, 
the  snare  of  our  imperious  desires,  from  which  we 
are  never  destined  to  escape.  We  face  here  a  dis- 
heartening determinism,  we  look  across  the  abyss 
that  lies  between  one  individual  and  another,  an 
abyss  over  which  it  seems  almost  impossible  to 
communicate,  and  it  begins  to  seem  as  if  we  should 
have  to  take  refuge  in  that  sort  of  aesthetic  solip- 
sism which,  rightly  or  wrongly,  we  associate  with 
Benedetto  Croce  and  Professor  Spingarn.  If  our 
tastes  are  mathematically  determined  by  the  sen- 
sibilities and  temperaments  with  which  we  are 
born,  and  if  any  logic  of  aesthetics  which  we  con- 
struct must  therefore  be  mathematically  deter- 
mined by  our  tastes,  of  what  use  is  any  such  logic 
of  aesthetics?  Of  what  use  is  it  to  talk  of 
aesthetic  values?  Where  all  is  relative,  who  will 
dare  assume  for  himself  the  role  of  the  absolute? 
Who  has  the  courage  to  say,  in  these  circum- 
stances, "My  taste  is  better  than  yours,  and  I  have 
these  reasons  for  it — "? 


APOLOGIA 

To  the  last  question  the  answer  is  simple:  we 
all  have.  Our  self  assurances  are  sublime. 
What  is  a  trifle  like  aesthetic  determinism*?  We 
know  what  we  like,  and  we  know  that  what  we 
like  is  the  best.  What  results  from  this,  of  course, 
is  the  feral  competition  among  critics  and  poet 
critics  which  I  have  been  discussing:  it  is  the  al- 
most total  absence  of  standard  weights  and  meas- 
ures which  makes  it  possible.  Success  will  be 
gauged,  of  course,  by  the  size  of  the  audience 
which  we  are  able  to  attract  and  hold,  the  number 
of  books  we  are  able  to  sell.  If  art  is  a  form  of 
community  expression,  a  kind  of  glorified  com- 
munication (to  quote  Mr.  Untermeyer)  then  it  is 
clear  enough,  is  it  not,  that  at  the  present  moment 
the  best  poets  we  have  are  Robert  W.  Service  and 
Ella  Wheeler  Wilcox.  But  I  hear  already  in- 
jured cries  from  other  quarters.  There  are  poets, 
I  dare  say,  who  will  have  the  audacity  to  tell  us 
that  the  figures  should  be  reversed  (such  is  the 
ingenuity  of  human  pride)  and  that  the  poet  who 
sells  one  hundred  and  nineteen  copies  of  his  book 
is  really  more  successful  than  the  poet  who  sells 
one  hundred  thousand.  The  audience,  they  will 
say,  should  be  an  intelligent  audience, — not 
merely  numerous, — and  it  should  show  a  dispo- 

[25: 


SCEPTICISMS 

sition  to  be  cumulative,  in  increasing  ratio,  after 
fifty  years. 

And  perhaps  they  are  right.  Perhaps,  after  all, 
this  is  the  only  sort  of  aesthetic  decision  we  can 
come  to;  this  gradual  and  massive  decision  of  the 
slow  generations,  this  magnificently  leisurely 
process  of  accretion  and  refinement,  particle  by 
particle,  century  by  century. 


VIII 

But  this  fact  contains  a  ray  of  hope  for  us. 
Massive  decisions  like  this  are  objective  facts, 
and  may  well  therefore  be  food  for  the  behaviour- 
ist psychologist  or  the  Freudian.  If  in  the  long 
run  humanity  prefers  this  or  that  sort  of  art,  it 
should  be  possible  to  find  the  reasons  for  this, 
to  say  eventually  just  what  chords  of  human  van- 
ity are  thereby  exquisitely  and  cajolingly  played 
upon.  Perhaps  we  shall  be  able  to  determine,  in 
relation  to  great  social  masses,  the  law  of  aesthetic 
fatigue  which  precipitates  those  changes  in  taste 
which  we  call  "literary  movements"  or  "revolts." 
It  may  even  become  possible,  at  a  given  moment, 
to  predict  a  new  era  of  "realism"  or  "idealism." 
Or  to  predict,  for  that  matter,  if  social  changes  go 


APOLOGIA 

far  enough,  the  legal  proscription  of  certain  forms 
of  art — the  romantic,  for  instance*? — Or  the  death 
of  art  altogether. 

IX 

These  speculations,  however,  are  a  little  fright- 
ening, and  I  leave  them  to  the  psychologists,  who, 
I  do  not  doubt,  will  give  those  of  us  who  are  poets 
frights  enough  on  this  score  before  we  die.  For 
the  present  it  will  suffice  to  point  out  that  since 
in  the  sphere  of  aesthetics  all  is  relative, — or  for 
each  new  generation,  at  any  rate,  relatively  rela- 
tive; and  since  this  is  particularly  true  just  now, 
when  experiment  and  innovation  are  so  common 
in  the  arts,  and  give  us  so  often  work  which  can- 
not in  any  completeness  be  compared  with  works 
given  to  us  by  the  past;  it  will  be  plain  enough 
that  a  large  part  of  the  success  of  any  such  innova- 
tor or  experimenter  will  depend  on  his  own  skill 
and  persistence  in  making  himself  heard.  This, 
at  any  rate,  right  or  wrong,  is  his  fixed  idea.  It 
is  the  fixed  idea  of  pretty  nearly  every  poet  now 
writing  in  this  country.  We  may  pretend,  some- 
times, to  be  indifferent  to  our  destinies,  but  at 
bottom  it  is  a  matter  of  considerable  concern  to 
us  whether  we  can  get  our  books  published  by  Z. 


SCEPTICISMS 

rather  than  by  Q.,  or  whether,  having  been  pub- 
lished, they  are  favourably  reviewed  by  the  New 
York  Times,  The  New  Republic,  The  Dial,  or 
what  not.  Not  that  we  value  the  opinions  of 
these  journals — how  perfectly  idiotic  they  can  be 
we  wisely  perceive  when,  as  not  infrequently,  they 
presume  to  tell  us  what  bad  poets  we  are,  or  even, 
in  their  incredible  blindness,  ignore  us  altogether. 
But  they  command  audiences,  and  we  ourselves 
wish  to  command  audiences.  If  we  are  con- 
demned to  be  among  those  gems  of  purest  ray 
serene  which  the  dark  unfathomed  caves  of  ocean 
bear,  we  shall  know  how  to  find,  ingeniously,  a 
proud  solace  for  that  solitude;  but  we  prefer — 
do  not  be  deceived  by  us  for  a  moment — a  well- 
lighted  shop-window  on  Maiden  Lane.  And  we 
make  this  preference  sufficiently  manifest,  I  think, 
by  the  dignified  haste  with  which  we  accept  any 
invitation  to  read  or  lecture,  and  the  apparent 
inexhaustibility  with  which  we  are  able  to  review 
books,  particularly  those  of  our  rivals.  It  is  a 
cut-throat  competition,  a  survival  of  the  fittest. 
We  lose  no  opportunity  to  praise  our  own  sort  of 
work,  or  to  condemn  that  sort  which  we  consider 
dangerous. 


APOLOGIA 


The  reader  now  perceives,  I  think,  what  he 
ought  to  expect  of  me.  I  am  no  exception  to  the 
rule.  My  own  book  is,  in  sum,  just  as  clearly  an 
ideograph  of  Aiken  as  "Tendencies  in  Modern 
American  Poetry"  is  of  Amy  Lowell  or  "The  New 
Era  in  American  Poetry"  is  of  Untermeyer.  The 
papers  that  compose  it  were,  almost  all  of  them, 
reviews  of  books,  and  they  stand  pretty  much  as 
they  were  originally  written.  They  represent  my 
own  particular  attempt  to  urge  the  poetic  currents 
of  the  day  in  a  direction  that  might  be  favourable 
to  me.  I  make  no  real  apology  for  this :  I  merely 
maintain  that  I  only  do  what  all  poets  do.  If 
pressed  by  some  one  seriously  well-disposed  to- 
wards me  to  admit  some  however  tiny  element  of 
disinterestedness  or  altruism,  I  would  probably, — 
like  every  other  poet-critic, — confess  that  my  sym- 
pathies are,  perhaps,  just  a  trifle  broader  and  more 
generous  than  the  average.  .  .  .  By  which  I  would 
mean,  subconsciously,  that  I  merely  carry  my  de- 
fence-reactions a  little  further  afield. 

I  could,  to  be  sure,  have  rewritten  these  papers 
in  such  a  way  as  to  have  made  a  plausibly 
integrated  unit  of  them — .  I  could  have  divided 


SCEPTICISMS 

my  book  neatly  into  chapters  on  Realism,  or 
Romanticism,  or  Vers  Libre,  or  The  Holophrastic 
Method ;  and  I  could  have  mentioned,  for  the  sake 
of  sales,  every  poet  in  the  Cumulative  Book  Index. 
But  to  cover,  as  it  were,  all  the  ground,  has  never 
been  my  purpose  as  a  reviewer,  and  I  do  not  see 
why  it  should  be  now.  My  intention,  in  these 
papers,  is  to  provoke  and  to  stimulate:  to  single 
out  for  a  certain  careful  casualness  of  illumina- 
tion, among  so  many  and  such  varied  aspects,  only 
those  facets  of  the  poetic  tendencies  of  the  day 
which  are,  for  one  reason  or  another,  suggestive. 
In  that  sense  the  book  will  be  found,  perhaps,  to 
compose  a  sort  of  unit,  or  comprise  a  gamut. 
That  it  contains  no  studies  of  such  poets  as  Robert 
Frost  or  Edwin  Arlington  Robinson,  poets  whom 
I  highly  esteem,  and  whom  I  often  have  occasion 
to  mention,  is  partly  accidental,  and  partly  be- 
cause the  works  of  both  poets  are  conspicuous,  in 
the  contemporary  medley,  for  precision  and  finish, 
and  lack  the  tentativeness  and  uncertainty  which 
provide  for  the  critic  his  most  seductive  problems. 
For  these  omissions,  and  for  the  inconsistencies 
which  indicate  like  milestones  the  tortuous  course 
of  my  growth,  and  which  the  shrewd  reader  will 
discover  for  himself,  I,  therefore,  make  no  apology. 


APOLOGIA 

The  inconsistencies  I  could,  indeed,  have  eradi- 
cated. They  remain  because  it  seems  to  me  that 
in  so  relative  a  world  they  may  have  a  kind  of 
value.  One  is  least  sure  of  one's  self,  some- 
times, when  one  is  most  positive. 


II 

The  Mechanism  of  Poetic 
Inspiration 

THERE  is  a  widespread  notion  in  the  pub- 
lic mind  that  poetic  inspiration  has  some- 
thing mysterious  and  translunar  about  it, 
something  which  altogether  escapes  human  analy- 
sis, which  it  would  be  almost  sacrilege  for  analysis 
to  touch.  The  Romans  spoke  of  the  poet's  divine 
afflatus,  the  Elizabethans  of  his  fine  frenzy.  And 
even  in  our  own  day  critics,  and  poets  themselves, 
are  not  lacking  who  take  the  affair  quite  as  seri- 
ously. Our  critics  and  poets  are  themselves 
largely  responsible  for  this, — they  are  a  sentimen- 
tal lot,  even  when  most  discerning,  and  cannot 
help  indulging,  on  the  one  hand,  in  a  reverential 
attitude  toward  the  art,  and,  on  the  other,  in  a 
reverential  attitude  toward  themselves.  Little  of 
the  scientific  spirit  which  has  begun  to  light  the 
literary  criticism  of  France,  for  example,  has  man- 
ifested itself  in  America.  Our  criticism  is  still  a 


POETIC    INSPIRATION 

rather  primitive  parade  of  likes  and  dislikes :  there 
is  little  inquiry  into  psychological  causes. 

Meanwhile,  if  the  literary  folk  have  been  dron- 
ing, the  scientists  have  been  busy.  Most  critics, 
at  least,  are  familiar  already  with  the  theory  of 
Sigmund  Freud,  that  poetry,  like  the  dream,  is  an 
outcome  of  suppression,  a  release  of  complexes. 
To  the  curious-minded  this,  however  erratic  or  in- 
adequate, was  at  any  rate  a  step  in  the  right  direc- 
tion. It  started  with  the  admirable  predicate  that 
after  all  poetry  is  a  perfectly  human  product,  and 
that  therefore  it  must  play  a  specific  part  in  the 
human  animal's  functional  needs.  It  at  once 
opened  to  the  psychologist  (amateur  as  well  as 
professional !),  the  entire  field  of  literature,  and  in 
a  new  light:  he  was  invited  to  behold  here  not 
merely  certain  works  of  art,  but  also  a  vast  amount 
of  documentary  evidence,  in  the  last  analysis 
nai've,  as  to  the  functioning  of  the  human  mind, — 
in  other  words,  so  many  confessions. 

In  the  beginning,  ludicrous  mistakes  and  exag- 
gerations were  made.  This  was  to  be  expected. 
Freud  himself  has  steadily  modified  his  position, 
as  was  bound  to  happen  in  the  early  and  neces- 
sarily empirical  stage  of  a  new  psychological 
method.  There  have  been  others,  too,  who  have 


SCEPTICISMS 

gone  forward  with  the  method,  in  a  purely  objec- 
tive way,  by  trial  and  error.  And  the  most  inter- 
esting of  them  from  the  literary  viewpoint  is 
Nicolas  Kostyleff,  whose  book,  "Le  Mecanisme 
Cerebrale  de  la  Pensee,"  was  published  in  Paris 
within  a  few  years.  In  addition  to  much  in  this 
book  which  is  of  an  interest  purely  psychological, 
there  are  also  successive  chapters  dealing  with  po- 
etic inspiration,  the  poetic  methods  of  Victor 
Hugo,  and  the  method  of  the  novelist.  M.  Kos- 
tyleff does  not  pretend  to  have  solved  any  of  these 
questions.  He  is  content  with  indicating  a  direc- 
tion,— he  does  not  attempt  to  delimit.  He  offers 
suggestions  and  observations  that  should  be  of  tre- 
mendous value  to  the  literary  critic. 

M.  Kostyleff,  in  the  chapter  devoted  to  poetic 
inspiration,  takes  as  his  starting-point  a  belief  that 
Freud's  explanation  of  it  as  due  entirely  to  hidden 
complexes,  largely  erotic,  is  insufficient.  Certain 
types  of  poetry,  notably  those  that  approximate 
wish-thinking,  clearly  indicate  such  an  origin. 
But  what  are  we  to  do  with  the  vast  amount  of 
poetry  which  cannot  so  conveniently  be  fitted  into 
this  category, — poetry,  for  example,  which  does 
not  in  any  obvious  sense  appear  to  be  the  satisfac- 
tion of  either  erotic  or  merely  aesthetic  needs: 

C343 


POETIC    INSPIRATION 

poetry,  indeed,  which  would  appear  to  belong  to 
a  cerebral  rather  than  a  merely  emotional  plane"? 
M.  Kostyleff  here  concludes,  it  appears  wisely, 
that  after  all  the  writing  of  poetry  is,  like  speech 
itself,  a  purely  cerebral  affair:  and  that  it  is  not 
the  result  of  a  discharge  of  an  excess  of  emotion  in 
the  poet  so  much  as  a  cerebral  reaction  to  external 
stimuli.  This  conclusion  he  at  once  connects  with 
a  theory,  developed  in  earlier  chapters,  of  verbo- 
motor  reactions:  a  theory  that  words,  like  other 
sensory  impressions  derived  from  contact  with 
reality,  are  stored  in  the  mind,  not  discretely,  but 
in  chains  of  association,  where  they  become  uncon- 
scious, and  appear  to  be  forgotten ;  but  that  upon  a 
given  stimulus  these  chains  of  associated  words  be- 
gin automatically  unravelling,  become  again  con- 
scious. 

With  this  theory  of  poetic  inspiration  in  mind, 
M.  Kostyleff  approached  various  contemporary 
French  poets  and  asked  them  to  divulge  the  secret 
of  their  methods  of  composition.  Among  these 
poets  were  Madame  de  Noailles,  M.  Robert  de 
Montesquiou,  M.  Haraucourt,  M.  Abel  Bonnard, 
and  M.  Fernand  Gregh.  The  explanations  of 
these  poets  seemed  at  first  sight  to  be  rather  di- 
vergent. Some  wrote  rapidly,  some  slowly. 


SCEPTICISMS 

Some  conceived  their  poems  in  terms  of  visual  line 
and  space,  some  aurally  in  terms  of  music.  Some 
started  with  the  final  or  key  line  and  wrote  up  to 
or  around  it,  and  some  sketched  rapidly  in  a  sort 
of  improvisation,  later  filling  in  and  altering. 
But  one  fact  began  to  emerge  which  seemed  to  be 
true  of  all:  the  fact  that  the  initial  impulse  was 
almost  always  due  to  an  external  stimulus  of  some 
sort  which  effected,  in  a  purely  cerebral  way,  an 
automatic  discharge  of  verbal  associations,  not 
necessarily  attended  by  an  excess  of  emotion.  It 
became  also  apparent  that  the  poets  themselves 
were  to  a  considerable  extent  aware  of  this.  They 
sought  to  document  themselves  on  subjects  which 
appealed  to  them,  so  as  to  enrich  their  associations ; 
and,  further,  they  endeavoured  to  surround  them- 
selves with  objects  in  some  way  related  to  the 
chosen  theme,  or  to  adopt,  if  possible,  a  suggestive 
environment. 

This  is  already,  it  is  clear,  a  sufficiently  shrewd 
blow  at  the  usual  theory  of  poetic  inspiration,  that 
it  is  due  to  a  tempest  of  emotion  in  the  poet.  But 
M.  KostylefF  makes  it  even  shrewder.  On  exam- 
ining carefully  the  work  of  these  various  poets  he 
found  it  to  be  almost  invariably  true  that  the  emo- 
tional value  of  the  completed  poem  far  outweighed 

[36] 


POETIC    INSPIRATION 

the  emotional  value  of  the  original  idea.  The  lat- 
ter, in  fact,  frequently  became  quite  insignificant. 
This  would  certainly  indicate  that  the  original  im- 
pulse is  merely  a  slight  spring,  which,  once  re- 
leased, sets  in  motion  a  rather  imposing  engine. 
In  fact,  it  was  found  in  many  cases  that  the  or- 
iginal idea  was  either  lost  sight  of  entirely  as  the 
poem  developed  or  actually  contradicted.  The 
explanation  of  this  is  simple,  if  the  basic  theory  is 
correct.  For  if  it  is  true  that  verbal  reflexes 
function  in  associated  chains,  then  we  should  ex- 
pect the  discharge  of  verbal  reflexes  to  be  self- 
generating,  one  set  of  associations  to  lead 
directly  to  another.  No  sooner  does  one  flight  of 
ideas  come  to  an  end  than  some  overtone  in  it 
awakens  further  associations  and  another  flight  be- 
gins. And  this  was  precisely  what  M.  Kostyleff 
found  to  be  true  in  his  examination  of  many  of 
these  poems,  particularly  in  the  first  drafts  of 
them,  with  the  many  omissions,  the  many  leaps  to 
what  at  first  glance  might  appear  to  be  unrelated 
ideas.  The  completed  poems,  then,  appeared  to  be 
not  so  much  orderly  developments  of  the  original 
theme  (which  indeed  in  most  instances  could  not 
alone  offer  the  necessary  amount  of  associations  to 
account  for  the  wealth  or  emotional  power  of  the 


SCEPTICISMS 

poem)  as  an  accumulation  of  successive  waves  of 
verbo-motor  discharge  due  to  association,  each 
rushing  farther  from  the  starting-point.  In  this 
manner  we  get  a  finished  poem  which  far  outruns, 
in  emotional  weight,  the  initial  impulse.  Of  Mr. 
Bonnard's  "Le  Chant  du  Coq  a  L'Aurore,"  for  ex- 
ample, M.  Kostyleff  remarks:  "It  is  evident  that 
this  inspiration  is  due  in  part  to  a  profound  emo- 
tion before  the  beauties  of  nature,  but  the  verbal 
discharge  certainly  surpasses  it  in  extent,  and  can 
only  be  explained  by  the  pleasure  of  renewing  it. 
.  .  .  And,  everything  considered,  the  emotion  and 
the  reaction  to  it  are  not  equivalent.  This  ex- 
plains also  why  in  other  cases  the  emotion  can  be 
slight,  almost  purely  intellectual.  In  the  preced- 
ing poem  it  is  an  emotion  such  as  one  feels,  or  can 
feel,  after  pleasure,  which  stimulates  the  imagina- 
tion. ...  It  is,  before  all,  a  play  of  cerebral  re- 
flexes ...  it  is  not  an  equivalent  of  emotion 
alone.  It  would  never  have  become  what  it  is  if 
it  had  not  had  at  its  disposal  great  richnesses  of 
memory,  verbal  and  visual;  which  permit  [the 
poet]  to  prolong  the  emotion,  to  renew  it,  and  to 
communicate  it  to  others."  Again,  of  "Douleur" 
by  Comtesse  de  Noailles,  he  says:  "The  feeling  is 
always  tender,  but  it  awakens  sometimes  an  ex- 

C383 


POETIC    INSPIRATION 

alted  thought,  sometimes  a  pessimistic  thought. 
This  proves  once  more  that  inspiration  is  not  to  be 
confused  with  the  emotion  which  causes  it.  We 
saw  it,  in  Bonnard,  outstrip  the  emotional  stimu- 
lus, we  see  it  now  in  contradiction  with  itself;  and 
that  alone  can  explain  the  sustained  flight  of  lit- 
erary creation.  If  poetry  were  only  an  emotional 
discharge,  it  would  be  very  much  less  complex 
than  it  is.  In  reality  the  emotional  shock  finds  in 
the  poet  preformed  cerebral  mechanisms :  mechan- 
isms preformed  by  study,  by  meditation,  by  life. 
These  are  chains  of  reflexes  which  are  not  them- 
selves kept  in  the  brain,  but  the  paths  of  which  are 
traced  there  and  easily  reproduced.  In  a  poet 
these  reproductions  are  particularly  easy,  and  the 
chains  very  numerous.  The  cerebral  reflexes,  be- 
coming linked  at  the  will  of  unforeseen  connec- 
tions, draw  him  along  beyond  the  emotional  stim- 
ulus. .  .  .  Indeed,  what  matters  the  extent  of  the 
emotional  power,  since  the  principle  does  not  lie 
there,  but  in  the  chains  of  cerebral  reflexes,  and 
since  the  latter  can  be  set  off  by  a  stimulus  wholly 
cerebral1?  .  .  .  This  obliges  us  to  admit  at  last 
that  poetic  inspiration  has  two  sources :  the  sensi- 
bility of  the  poet,  and  the  preformed  mechanisms 
of  verbal  reactions.  These  last  we  understand  in 

C39] 


SCEPTICISMS 

the  widest  sense  of  the  term,  with  the  images  to 
which  they  attach  themselves,  as  also  with  quite 
precise  qualities  of  rhythm  and  vocal  harmony. 
A  great  poet  is  recognized  not  only  because  he  is 
sensitive  and  vibrant,  but  also  by  the  wholly  per- 
sonal qualities  of  this  mechanism.  And  that  is 
not  a  word  of  simple  meaning.  The  personal 
qualities  consist  in  the  evocation  of  impressions 
which  are  not  banal,  and  in  the  expression  of  them 
in  a  rhythm  and  sonority  peculiar  to  themselves. 
.  .  .  This  formula  seems  to  be  important,  espe- 
cially for  our  time,  when  there  are  so  many  good 
poets — and  so  few  great  ones.  ...  It  is  time  to 
establish  clearly  in  the  eyes  of  the  literary  critic 
that  to  be  a  true  poet  it  is  not  sufficient  to  have 
emotivity,  internal  fever,  nor  even  a  certain  rich- 
ness of  cerebral  images ;  it  is  also  necessary  to  have 
a  gift  of  verbo-motor  discharge  which  is  personal. 
For  objective  psychology,  this  presents  something 
quite  precise,  the  mental  images  being  the  cerebral 
reflexes  directly  associated  with  those  of  hearing 
and  speech.  This  association  is  not  innate:  it  is 
formed  little  by  little  from  the  first  years  of  life. 
What  is  innate  in  the  poet  is  a  certain  refinement 
of  the  sensorial  organs.  Seeing  and  hearing  much 
as  other  children  do,  he  must  retain  more  memo- 


POETIC    INSPIRATION 

ries,  and  better  selected  impressions.  Each  of 
these  traces  the  path  of  a  reflex;  the  visual  and 
auditory  reflexes  are  associated  with  definite  verbal 
reactions;  and  at  the  time  when  his  nervous  sys- 
tem becomes  rich  enough  to  produce  sensorial  dis- 
charges, he  finds  himself  already  gifted  with  what 
we  have  just  called  the  preformed  mechanism  of 
verbal  reactions."  In  this  connection  M.  Kosty- 
lefF  points  out  that,  as  we  should  expect,  poets  are 
precocious  as  children,  read  omnivorously  at  an 
early  age,  and  thus  store  up  rich  deposits  of  verbo- 
motor  reactions,  rich  not  only  as  regards  sensorial 
impressions,  but  also  as  regards  prosodic  arrange- 
ment. And  as  evidence  that  the  mature  poet  is 
not  above  enriching  his  vocabulary  by  conscious 
effort  he  goes  rather  exhaustively  into  a  survey  of 
the  methods  by  which  Victor  Hugo  was  accus- 
tomed to  document  himself  for  literary  creation, 
and  into  the  rather  elaborate  system  of  auto-sug- 
gestion (through  choice  of  environment,  books, 
mode  of  life)  by  which  M.  Robert  de  Montes- 
quiou  induces  in  himself  the  proper  frame  of  mind 
for  work.  And  at  the  end  of  his  chapter  he  con- 
cludes : 

To  be  a  great  poet  it  is  not  at  all  necessary  to  have  a 
temperament  as  pronounced  as  that  of  a  Musset  or  a 

[41] 


SCEPTICISMS 

Baudelaire.  A  delicate  taste,  if  it  be  personal,  may  also 
serve  as  a  basis  for  poetic  inspiration.  But  it  is  the 
essential  condition  for  this  that  the  specific  sensibility  of 
the  individual  should  determine  for  him  the  formation  of 
an  adequate  mechanism  of  verbal  reactions.  .  .  .  The 
number  of  parlour  poets  increases,  and  many  of  them 
lack  neither  emotion  nor  energy  nor  sonority  of  expres- 
sion. In  what  do  they  fail  of  being  true  poets?  The 
study  we  have  just  made  directly  answers  this  question. 
They  lack  a  personal  mechanism  of  verbal  reactions. 
This  mechanism  is  part  of  inspiration.  It  is  formed 
long  before  the  moment  of  discharge,  from  all  that  the 
poet  reads  or  hears,  and  when  the  moment  arrives,  it 
begins  to  act  without  his  being  able  to  say  whence  the 
words  come  to  him.  Every  one  uses  words,  most  words 
can  be  made  into  verses,  but  the  more  or  less  personal 
character  of  the  latter  distinguishes  clearly  those  which 
are  only  an  imitation,  an  echo  of  the  poetic  harmonies 
of  the  past,  from  the  "sovereign  verses"  which  leap  from 
the  mind  of  the  poet  as  the  product  of  a  personal  faculty 
for  storing  up  and  grouping  verbal  reactions.  .  .  .  Ob- 
jective psychology  finds  here  a  very  important  contribu- 
tion. To  the  factor  revealed  by  Freud, — (the  stimulus 
in  the  revival  of  psychic  complexes, — )  we  see  added 
another  having  an  equally  precise  place  in  the  organism, 
— an  extraordinarily  extended  chain  of  verbal  reactions. 

M.  Kostyleff  does  not  presume,  naturally,  in 
reaching  this  conclusion,  to  have  cleared  up  the 
entire  problem, — he  is  probably  as  aware  as  any 


POETIC    INSPIRATION 

one  that  he  has  made  only  a  beginning.  For  at 
once  further  baffling  questions  arise.  To  begin 
with,  though  we  can  subscribe  without  reluctance 
to  the  main  tenet  of  M.  KostylefFs  thesis  that  once 
set  in  motion  a  flight  of  poetic  creations  is  to  some 
extent  self-renewing,  ramifying  by  association 
from  one  group  of  reflexes  to  another ;  and  though 
we  cannot  help  being  struck  by  the  plausibility  of 
his  conclusion  that  the  sole  difference  between  the 
imitative  and  the  original  poet  is  in  the  more  per- 
sonal quality  of  the  latter's  mechanism  of  verbal 
reactions,  it  is  clear  that  in  this  matter  of  the 
"personal  quality"  lies  something  which,  though 
of  very  great  importance  from  the  literary  view- 
point, is  left  rather  vague.  It  will  be  recalled 
that  M.  Kostyleff  makes  a  good  deal  of  the  fact 
that  the  poet,  both  instinctively  in  childhood  and 
deliberately  in  maturity,  seeks  by  reading  to  en- 
large his  vocabulary  and  the  richness  of  his  pro- 
sodic  sense.  But  of  course  the  imitative  poet  does 
this  quite  as  much  as  the  original  one :  if  not  more. 
His  stores  of  verbo-motor  reactions  are  acquired, 
presumably,  in  quite  the  same  sort  of  way. 
Where,  then,  does  the  difference  arise?  In  what 
manner  does  this  store  become,  as  M.  Kostyleff 
says,  more  closely  related  in  the  one  case  than  in 

C43H 


SCEPTICISMS 

the  other  to  the  poet's  specific  sensibility*?  It  is 
at  least  questionable  whether  this  distinction  is 
not  a  false  one.  For,  in  a  broad  sense,  no  individ- 
ual's store  of  verbo-motor  reactions  can  be  other 
than  specifically  personal  to  him.  This  would 
seem  to  force  our  search  for  a  distinction  backward 
one  degree  to  the  matter  of  sensibility  itself.  It 
would  suggest  a  revision  of  M.  Kostyleff's  state- 
ment that  imitative  poets  "lack  a  personal  mechan- 
ism of  verbal  reactions"  to  a  statement  that, 
though  fully  equipped  with  such  a  mechanism, 
(many  such  poets  have,  even  among  literary  folk, 
exceptional  vocabularies)  they  lack  any  peculiar- 
ity of  sensibility:  they  do  not  extend  the  field  of 
our  consciousness  in  any  new  direction.  This 
would  in  turn  indicate  that  M.  Kostyleff  puts  un- 
due emphasis  on  the  merely  linguistic  aspect  of  the 
poet's  function,  with  a  faint,  though  perhaps  un- 
intentional, implication  that  language  determines 
thought  rather  more  than  thought  determines  lan- 
guage. But  may  not  a  poet  be  great  even  if  there 
be  nothing  remarkably  original  or  bizarre  about  his 
work  with  respect  to  language  or  style, — great  by 
reason  of  the  poetic  content,  or  thought,  rather 
than  for  verbal  or  prosodic  brilliance'?  .  .  .  This 
brings  us  to  the  fact  that  there  are  two  great  ten- 


POETIC    INSPIRATION 

dencies  in  poetry, — two  kinds  of  poetic  value ;  and 
the  classification  seems  to  obtain  for  other  arts  as 
well.  In  one  of  them  the  emphasis  is  on  the  ex- 
ternals,— on  form,  style,  colour,  texture,  with  the 
intention  of  producing  a  sensorial  effect  as  bril- 
liant as  possible;  in  the  other  the  emphasis  is  on 
the  content,  and  the  style  is  made  secondary,  a 
transparent  glass  through  which  one  may  most 
perfectly  see.  Clearly,  it  is  on  poetry  of  the  for- 
mer rather  than  of  the  latter  class  that  M.  Kosty- 
leff  has  based  his  conclusions :  the  lyric  and  decora- 
tive rather  than  the  philosophical  and  narrative. 
For  it  is  obvious  at  once  that  in  poetry  of  the  lat- 
ter class  the  direction  of  the  poem  would  not  be 
dictated  by  the  automatic  unfolding  of  associated 
verbal  chain  reflexes,  but,  on  the  contrary,  that 
the  verbal  mechanisms  themselves  would  be  di- 
rected throughout  by  the  original  poetic  theme.  .  .  . 
If  it  is  true,  therefore,  that  M.  KostylefT  has 
thrown  an  extremely  interesting  light  on  one  me- 
chanical aspect  of  literary  creation,  he  clearly  fails, 
indeed  he  does  not  attempt,  to  bring  this  aspect  of 
it  into  relation  with  the  aspect  studied  by  Freud. 
We  are  shown  parts  of  the  machine,  but  not  the 
machine  in  motion.  What,  after  all,  is  the  com- 
pelling power  at  the  bottom  of  poetic  creation"? 


SCEPTICISMS 

If  it  were  merely  a  matter  of  mechanical  reactions, 
on  a  verbal  plane,  blind  and  accidental,  it  is  obvi- 
ous that  one  experience  quite  as  much  as  another 
would  cause  a  poetic  precipitate  in  the  poet's  mind. 
But  we  know  this  not  to  be  true.  It  is  apparent 
that  some  selective  principle  is  at  work:  some  af- 
fective principle,  or  pleasure  principle,  which  vi- 
tally concerns  the  poet.  He  reacts  more  acutely 
and  more  richly  to  some  stimuli  than  to  others ;  and 
even  among  these  reactions  he  exercises  a  rigid  sys- 
tem of  suppression  and  selection.  To  be  sure  this 
power  is  self -generating,  once  started, — by  accre- 
tion the  affects  intensify  and  perpetuate  them- 
selves, leaving  always  a  richer  deposit  of  associa- 
tions, a  greater  capacity  for  prolonged  cerebral  re- 
sponse. But  we  must  not  forget  that  this  selec- 
tive principle  has  its  beginning  somewhere,  that 
it  is  universal,  that  it  arises  in  accordance  with 
some  need.  Every  man,  as  it  has  become  com- 
monplace to  remark,  is  in  some  degree  a  poet.  In 
consequence  it  is  clear  that  in  dealing  with  poetry 
we  are  dealing  with  something  which  plays  some 
specific  and  organic  part  in  the  life  of  man.  This, 
in  default  of  any  more  plausible  suggestion,  brings 
us  back  to  the  theory  of  Freud.  It  is  to  some  deep 
hunger,  whether  erotic  or  not,  or  to  some  analogous 


POETIC    INSPIRATION 

compulsion,  that  we  must  look  for  the  source  of 
the  power  that  sets  in  motion  the  delicate  mechan- 
ism, on  another  plane,  which  M.  Kostyleff  has  be- 
gun to  illuminate  for  us.  It  is  clear  that  this  is 
not  merely  a  sexual  hunger,  nor  an  aesthetic  hun- 
ger, nor  an  ethical  hunger,  though  all  may  have 
their  place  in  it.  ...  Is  it  merely  in  general  the 
hunger  of  the  frustrate  (which  we  all  are)  for 
richer  experience? 

However  we  answer  that  question,  it  is  certain 
that  such  objective  studies  of  literature  as  this  of 
M.  Kostyleff  indicate  for  us  a  new  method  in  lit- 
erary criticism.  With  the  clouds  of  myth  and 
mystery  blown  away,  we  begin  to  see  more  clearly ; 
we  shall  be  better  able  to  understand  and  to  dis- 
criminate. And  if  we  are  thus  made  to  see  that 
literature  plays  a  vital  functional  part  in  our  lives, 
we  must  eventually  begin  to  value  our  literature, 
more  consciously,  in  the  degree  in  which  it  fulfils 
that  function. 


C473 


Ill 

Poetry  in  America 

1917 

LIKE  the  poor,  Mr.  Braithwaite's  "Anthol- 
ogy" is  always  with  us :  a  year  passes,  an- 
other myriad  or  so  of  magazines  falls 
from  the  press,  and  once  more  Mr.  Braithwaite  has 
scoured  them  all,  and  gives  us  the  result  in  two 
hundred  odd  pages.  Examine,  for  instance,  the 
Anthology  for  1916.  What  new  thing  can  be 
said  of  it1?  It  does  not  change.  It  is  six  pages 
shorter  than  the  year  before;  it  selects  for  special 
praise  only  fifteen,  instead  of  thirty-five,  books  of 
verse, — both  of  which  abridgments  are  for  the  bet- 
ter. But  whether  through  inability  or  unwilling- 
ness, Mr.  Braithwaite  seems  no  nearer  learning 
that  there  can  be  little  excuse  for  an  anthology 
which  does  not  select.  Once  more  we  have  the 
clarion  preface  (a  clarion  uncertainly  played)  pro- 
claiming that  the  present  era  of  American  poetry 
is  to  be  compared  with  the  Elizabethan  and  other 

C483 


POETRY    IN    AMERICA 

great  eras ;  a  solemn  catalogue  of  names  held  illus- 
trious; and  once  more  the  verse  itself  follows  on 
this  with  a  harshly  negative  answer. 

Is  there  any  use  in  merely  abusing  Mr.  Braith- 
waite  for  the  many  inaccuracies  and  hasty  super- 
ficialities in  his  preface — for  his  cool  assertion  that 
Mr.  Pound  is  the  idol  of  those  nimble  acrobats 
who  whirl  and  tumble  through  the  pages  of 
"Others";  that  Poetry  is  Mr.  Pound's  organ  of 
radicalism;  that  Mr.  Kreymborg  is  the  one  poet 
produced  by  the  "Others"  group,  or  Miss  Amy 
Lowell  the  one  poet  produced  by  the  Imagist 
group ;  or  that  Masters,  Frost,  Oppenheim,  Robin- 
son, and  Miss  Branch  dominate  each  a  group-ten- 
dency"? We  have  learned,  I  hope,  to  expect  this 
sort  of  thing,  and  to  discount  it.  We  know  that 
the  affair  is  not  so  simple  as  this.  We  watch  Mr. 
Braithwaite  sliding  over  the  smooth  surface,  and 
smile.  But  none  the  less,  if  we  are  to  help  poetry 
at  all  in  this  wilderness,  we  cannot  rest  content 
with  amusement.  Mr.  Braithwaite  is  a  standing 
warning  to  us  that  we  must  keep  our  wits  about 
us;  if  every  word  that  falls  from  Mr.  Braith- 
waite's  lips  is  a  pearl  of  eulogy,  we  on  our  part 
must  be  prepared  to  utter  toads  of  censure. 

It  is  difficult  to  compare  one  of  these  anthologies 

C493 


SCEPTICISMS 

with  another.  The  editor  professes  to  see  an  im- 
provement, to  be  sure,  but  if  there  is  any,  it  is 
unimportant.  What  we  can  say  clearly  is  that 
this  volume,  like  its  predecessors,  is  for  the  most 
part  filled  with  the  jog-trot  of  mediocrity.  One 
must  wade  through  pages  and  pages  of  mawkish- 
ness,  dulness,  artificiality,  and  utter  emptiness  to 
come  upon  the  simple  dignity  of  Mr.  Fletcher's 
"Lincoln"  (marred  by  a  faintly  perfumed  close), 
or  the  subdued,  colloquial  tenderness  of  Mr. 
Frost's  "Home-Stretch,"  or  the  sinister  pattern  of 
"The  Hill-Wife,"  or  Miss  Lowell's  delicately  im- 
agined "City  of  Falling  Leaves."  What  else 
stands  out"?  Here  and  there  are  pleasant  lines, 
stanzas,  poems, — but  for  the  most  part  one  gets 
an  impression  of  amateurishness,  of  simply  lines 
and  lines  and  lines,  all  of  them  a  little  conscious 
of  the  fact  that  they  are  iambic,  or  dactylic,  or  ana- 
paestic, or  trochaic,  or  prose,  all  of  them  a  little 
uneasy  about  their  rhymes,  their  ideas,  or  the  ap- 
palling necessity  of  somehow  coming  to  an  end. 
Here  we  have  poets  who,  with  quaint  solemnity, 
tell  us  of  "  minstrelsy  as  rich  as  wine,  as  sweet  as 
oil,"  who  "parley"  with  stars,  or  confess  to  having 
"tears  of  awful  wonder"  run  "adown"  their 


POETRY   IN   AMERICA 

cheeks,  or  describe  the  song  of  the  swallows  as 
their  "spill,"  or  proclaim  themselves  "cousin  to 
the  mud,"  or  ask  us  to  "list!",  when  they  mean 
listen;  and  it  is  left  to  Mr.  Untermeyer  to  reach 
the  height  of  bathos  in  asking 

God,  when  the  rosy  world  first  learned  to  crawl 
About  the  floor  of  heaven,  wert  thou  not  proud? 

What  is  one  to  say  to  all  this — this  inane  falsify- 
ing and  posturing,  this  infantile  lack  of  humour  or 
ordinary  intelligence*?  How  does  it  happen  that 
it  is  only  a  scant  dozen  times  in  the  course  of  these 
184  pages  that  we  find  anything  like  a  profound 
approach  to  the  problems  of  our  lives,  or  a  serene 
and  proportioned  understanding  of  them,  or  a  pas- 
sionate rebellion  at  them,  or  anything,  in  fact,  but 
clutters  of  thin  sentiment,  foolishly  expressed,  and 
dusty  concatenations  of  petty  irrelevancies*?  Is 
it  Mr.  Braithwaite's  fault;  or  is  it  because  we  have 
nothing  better  to  offer?  Is  there,  then,  any  poetry 
being  written  in  this  country  which  we  can  hope- 
fully put  beside  the  recent  work  of  the  English 
poets — the  work  of  Lascelles  Abercrombie,  Wil- 
frid Gibson,  Walter  de  la  Mare,  or  Masefield*? 
I  think  we  can  make  an  affirmative  answer;  and 


SCEPTICISMS 

in  so  doing,  of  course,  we  condemn  at  once  the 
method  employed  by  Mr.  Braithwaite  in  the  com- 
pilation of  his  yearly  anthology. 

For,  as  has  already  been  said  many  times  to  Mr. 
Braithwaite,  it  is  comparatively  seldom  that  any 
of  our  magazines  print  poetry.  Of  verse,  to  be 
sure, — free  or  formal, — they  print  any  amount: 
they  are  stifled  with  it.  In  some  measure  they 
have  tried  to  respond  to  the  wave  of  enthusiasm  for 
poetry  which  has  risen  in  America  during  the  last 
few  years,  but  they  have  proved  pathetically  in- 
adequate. What,  after  all,  could  they  do"? 
Magazines  can  thrive  only  by  reaching  the  great- 
est possible  number.  And  the  one  essential  rule 
for  reaching  the  greatest  possible  number  is  to  hold 
fast  to  tradition,  whether  ethical  or  literary,  to 
avoid  anything  even  remotely  in  the  nature  of  sub- 
version; or,  if  it  becomes  necessary  through  com- 
petition to  advance,  to  advance  with  the  utmost 
caution.  The  formal  sonnet,  sprinkled  with 
"thou's"  and  "thee's"  and  exclamatory  "O's,"  pre- 
ferably calling  upon  the  spirit  of  a  nation,  or  ad- 
dressed to  a  dead  poet,  or  anything  else  dead,  is 
the  supreme  gift.  The  exalted  ode  is  a  close  sec- 
ond. And  after  these  come  the  numberless  hosts 
of  the  ephemeral  sentimental, — all  that  we  have 


POETRY    IN   AMERICA 

been  taught  to  consider  good  and  true,  brave  and 
sweet. 

It  becomes  apparent,  therefore,  that  if  we  are 
to  find  poetry  in  America  today  we  must  look  for 
it  outside  the  magazines — in  books.  And  this,  of 
course,  is  where  we  do  find  it,  such  as  it  is.  There 
can  be  no  question  that  had  Mr.  Braithwaite  com- 
posed his  anthology  from  books,  instead  of  from 
magazines,  it  could  have  been  one  thousand  per 
cent  better.  It  is  not  certain  that  Mr.  Braithwaite 
could  have  done  it,  to  be  sure,  for  Mr.  Braithwaite 
is  not  by  endowment  a  critic:  the  evidence  before 
us  in  this  "Anthology"  for  1916  is  dumbly  to  the 
effect  that  Mr.  Braithwaite  is  incredibly  undis- 
criminating.  What  else  can  we  say  of  the  man 
who  in  his  list  of  the  fifteen  best  books  of  the  year 
omits  Fletcher's  "Goblins  and  Pagodas,"  Mase- 
field's  "Good  Friday,"  Masters's  "The  Great 
Valley,"  de  la  Mare's  "The  Listeners,"  William 
H.  Davies's  "Poems,"  the  second  "Imagist  Anthol- 
ogy," Kreymborg's  "Mushrooms,"  and  Sandburg's 
"Chicago  Poems,"  while  he  includes  the  very  infe- 
rior "Songs  and  Satires"  of  Masters,  "War  and 
Laughter"  by  James  Oppenheim,  "Harvest 
Moon"  by  Josephine  Preston  Peabody,  and  other 
works  by  Bliss  Carman,  Adelaide  Crapsey,  Amelia 

[53] 


SCEPTICISMS 

Burr,  Charles  Wharton  Stork,  and  Rabindranath 
Tagore?  This  is  the  plainest  sort  of  critical 
blindness.  It  is  here  not  a  question  of  being  con- 
servative or  radical — it  is  a  question  of  good  taste. 
A  study  of  these  juxtapositions  will  make  it  only 
too  clear. 

If  we  are  to  take  seriously,  therefore,  Mr. 
Braithwaite's  enthusiasms  over  contemporary 
American  poetry,  as  expressed  in  his  preface,  and 
in  his  critical  summaries  at  the  end  of  his  volume, 
we  begin  to  realize  that  he  has  damaged  his  case 
at  the  outset  by  restricting  himself  to  such  verse  as 
gets  into  the  magazines.  It  must  be  obvious  to 
any  one  that  any  such  selection  does  our  poets  a 
serious  injustice:  it  is  not,  and  in  the  nature  of 
things  cannot  be,  fairly  representative  of  our  best. 
The  basic  principle  is  wrong.  For  that  we  have 
poets  now  who  deserve  to  be  taken  seriously,  even 
if  they  are  not  Shakespeares,  there  certainly  can 
be  far  less  question  than  there  was  even  two  years 
ago.  Since  1913  how  much  has  happened!  In 
the  autumn  of  1914,  Miss  Lowell  and  Mr.  Vachel 
Lindsay  first  made  themselves  clearly  heard.  In 
the  spring  of  1915,  one  after  another,  came  the 
first  "Imagist  Anthology,"  Masters's  "Spoon 
River,"  Frost's  "North  of  Boston,"  Fletcher's  "Ir- 


POETRY   IN   AMERICA 

radiations."  And  in  1916,  a  year  in  which  for  the 
first  time  in  our  literary  history  more  volumes  of 
poetry  and  drama  were  published  than  of  any 
other  class,  we  saw  the  publication  of  Fletcher's 
"Goblins  and  Pagodas,"  the  second  "Imagist  An- 
thology," the  "Others  Anthology,"  Sandburg's 
"Chicago  Poems,"  Kreymborg's  "Mushrooms," 
Masters's  "Songs  and  Satires"  and  "The  Great 
Valley,"  Amy  Lowell's  "Men,  Women,  and 
Ghosts,"  Frost's  "Mountain  Interval,"  and  Robin- 
son's "Man  Against  the  Sky."  Of  all  these,  Ed- 
win Arlington  Robinson  is  the  only  one  who 
clearly  reaches  back  into  the  period  before  1914. 
Of  the  others,  nearly  all  had  been  writing,  and  one 
or  two  had  tentatively  published ;  but  in  the  main 
they  are  poets  who  have  reached  their  maturity 
since  1913. 

What  are  we  to  say  of  these  poets,  and  of  their 
poetry?  No  one,  of  course,  can  say  finally,  "this 
is  good  and  will  endure" ;  or  "this  is  bad  and  will 
perish."  Any  opinion  must  be  personal,  rooted 
in  profound  and  for  the  most  part  unconscious 
predilections  and  prejudices,  obscured  by  biases  of 
friendship  or  the  opposite,  confused  with  questions 
of  social,  ethical,  or  philosophical  character;  and 
my  own  opinion,  quite  as  much  as  Mr.  Braith- 


SCEPTICISMS 

waite's,  is  a  ganglion  of  just  such  factors,  and  just 
as  much  to  be  guarded  against  and  discounted. 
But  having  made  this  candid  confession  of  our  all- 
too-humanness,  let  us  be  candid  in  our  opinions 
also. 

To  begin  with,  we  must  face  squarely  the  un- 
pleasant fact  that,  both  in  and  out  of  the  public 
press,  we  have  been  very  seriously  overestimating 
the  work  of  contemporary  poets:  enthusiasm  for 
poetry,  and  an  intense  and  long-suppressed  desire 
to  see  it  flourish  in  America,  have  played  the  deuce 
with  our  judgments.  In  too  many  cases  the  wish 
has  been  father  to  the  thought.  Not  only  have  we 
been  undiscriminating,  applauded  the  false  as 
loudly  as  the  true,  but  we  have  persisted  in  a  sort 
of  wilful  blindness  to  the  many  and  obvious  faults 
of  even  our  best.  Bad  leadership,  of  course,  has 
conduced  to  this.  We  have  had  no  critics  whom 
we  could  trust.  Miss  Monroe  and  Mr.  Braith- 
waite,  to  both  of  whom  we  all  owe  more  than  we 
can  say,  have,  when  all  is  said  and  done,  been 
better  drum-bangers  than  critics.  Both  have  been 
somewhat  insular  in  outlook,  intolerant  of  all  that 
is  a  little  alien  to  them,  intolerant  of  each  other, 
and  somewhat  amusingly  determined  to  find 
"great"  American  poets.  Mr.  Kilmer  and  Mr. 


POETRY    IN    AMERICA 

Untermeyer,  both  ubiquitous  reviewers,  the  more 
elusive  because  so  many  of  their  reviews  have  been 
unsigned,  have  been  equally  limited,  intellectually, 
and  have  left  always  the  savour  of  cult  or  clique 
in  their  pronouncements.  Two  critics  we  have 
who  stand  clear  of  ax-grinding  and  nepotism, 
who  analyse  sharply,  who  delight  to  use  words  as 
poniards — Mr.  Mencken  of  The  Smart  Set  and 
Mr.  Firkins  of  The  Nation;  but  with  these  the 
misfortune  is  that  they  are  essentially  of  the  older 
order,  and  have  an  embarrassing  tenderness  for  all 
that  is  sentimental,  politely  romantic,  formal,  eth- 
ically correct.  The  balance  of  power,  therefore, 
has  been  with  the  praisers,  with  Miss  Monroe, 
whose  Poetry  has  manifested  a  tendency  to  be- 
come a  sort  of  triumphal  car  for  the  poets  of  the 
West  and  Middle  West,  with  Mr.  Braithwaite, 
whose  Transcript  reviews  have  seemed  at  times 
to  become  a  wholesale  business  in  laurel  wreaths, 
and  with  others,  less  fortunate  in  their  power,  of 
the  same  nature.  And  in  consequence,  even  the 
most  cautious  of  us  have  been  in  spite  of  ourselves 
somewhat  infected  by  the  prevailing  idolatries. 
It  has  become  habitual  to  accept,  unpleasant  to 
censure.  When  we  criticize  at  all,  we  condemn 
utterly;  when  we  praise,  we  sing  panegyrics. 


SCEPTICISMS 

There  has  been  no  middle  course  of  balanced  and 
impartial  analysis,  no  serene  perspective, — above 
all,  no  taste.  It  seems  as  if  we  have  not  been  long 
enough  civilized,  as  if  there  were  too  much  still 
undigested,  or  indigestible,  in  our  environment. 

We  have  therefore  a  group  of  myths  among  us, 
some  or  all  of  them  conflicting,  and  sedulously  en- 
couraged by  the  publishers.  A  vague  notion  is 
abroad  that  Frost,  Masters,  Robinson,  Lindsay, 
Fletcher,  Miss  Lowell,  and  others  still  who  have 
not  been  quite  so  successful,  are,  if  not  great  poets, 
at  any  rate  brilliantly  close  to  it.  Whether  this 
is  true  or  not  need  not  at  once  concern  us.  What 
becomes  important  for  us,  in  the  circumstances,  is 
to  realize  that  if  these  poets  are  as  commanding 
as  we  think  them  to  be,  it  is  time  for  us  to  stop 
spattering  them  with  unmixed  praise — which  we 
do  under  the  quaint  delusion  that  we  are  writing 
serious  articles  upon  them — and  look  at  them,  for 
once,  with  more  of  the  scientist's  eye,  and  less  of 
the  lover's.  We  need  to  remind  ourselves  that 
they  are  flesh  and  blood,  as  liable  to  failures  and 
mistakes  as  ourselves,  constantly  and  sometimes 
desperately  struggling  for  a  precarious  foothold, 
sometimes  driven  to  foolishness  by  the  keenness  of 
the  competition,  sometimes  exhausted  by  it. 

C583 


POETRY    IN   AMERICA 

What  compels  them  to  do  what  they  do?  What 
faults  result  from  this,  and  what  virtues'?  What 
can  we  expect  of  them?  This  is  the  sort  of  ques- 
tion we  should  be  getting  ready  to  ask  them. 

Turning  upon  them  from  this  quarter,  we 
should  at  once  find  them  looking  a  little  less  im- 
posing. We  should  begin  to  see  first  of  all  one 
great  and  glaring  characteristic  of  practically  all 
American  poets:  that,  though  rich  in  invention, 
they  are  poor  in  art.  Exceptions  to  this  there  are, 
— notably,  Edwin  Arlington  Robinson,  who,  per- 
haps, in  other  respects  pays  the  penalty.  But  in 
the  main  that  stigma  touches  them  all.  Most  con- 
spicuous in  the  work  of  Mr.  Masters  and  Miss 
Lowell,  it  is  by  no  means  restricted  to  them  alone, 
— few,  if  any,  escape  it.  No  clearer  line  of  cleav- 
age divides  contemporary  American  poetry  from 
contemporary  English :  we  may  prefer  the  greater 
richness  and  variety  of  the  American,  its  greater  re- 
lentlessness  in  search  of  realities;  but  the  instant 
we  turn  to  the  English  we  feel  a  certain  distinction, 
a  certain  intellectual  and  aesthetic  ease  and  free- 
dom, no  matter  on  what  plane — whether  in  the 
clear  lyrics  of  de  la  Mare  and  Hodgson  and  Da  vies 
and  Aldington,  or  the  strange,  powerful,  almost  la- 
boured psychological  episodes  of  Gibson,  or  the 


SCEPTICISMS 

intellectual  spaciousness  and  tortuous  energy  of 
Abercrombie.  And  this  lack  of  distinction,  this 
inability  of  our  poets  to  make  their  inventions 
works  of  art, — to  speak  with  that  single-toned 
authenticity  which  arises  from  perfect  expression, 
— constitutes  the  most  serious  menace  against  their 
possible  survival.  Mr.  Frost  is  our  most  con- 
sistent performer,  of  course, — we  can  place  him 
over  against  the  English  poets  akin  to  him  without 
blushing.  And  Mr.  Robinson,  too,  is  in  this  re- 
spect dependable,  though  he  tends  to  jingle,  does 
not  command  the  power  or  the  lyric  beauty  of  the 
others,  and  abuses  his  trick  of  veiled  implications. 
After  this,  we  are  in  the  dark.  Miss  Lowell, 
Fletcher,  Masters,  have  all  done  brilliant  work 
in  their  kinds, — but  even  the  best  of  it  is  marred 
by  strange  artistic  blindnesses.  They  cannot  be 
counted  upon.  They  write  prose  with  one  hand 
and  poetry  with  the  other,  and  half  the  time  know 
not  what  they  do.  If  one  moment  they  select 
carefully,  the  next  moment  they  empty  cartloads. 
They  seem  for  ever  uncertain  whether  to  sing  or  to 
talk,  and  consequently  try  sometimes  to  do  both 
at  once. 

The  plain  fact  is  that  we  have  been  passing 
through  a  period  of  ferment,  a  period  of  uncer- 


POETRY    IN   AMERICA 

tainty,  experiment,  transition.  A  great  variety 
of  intellectual  energies  has  been  simultaneously 
catalyzed  by  a  great  variety  of  stimuli,  and  the 
result  inevitably  has  been  chaos.  Realists  have 
sprung  up,  reverent  as  well  as  irreverent;  roman- 
ticists have  sprung  up,  radical  as  well  as  conven- 
tional; and  in  addition  to  these  major  groups  have 
risen  detached  individuals  difficult  to  classify,  and 
other  groups  heterogeneously  composed.  Experi- 
ment is  the  order  of  the  day.  Desperation  to  say 
the  last  word,  to  go  farthest,  to  dissolve  tradition 
and  principle  in  the  most  brilliant  self -conscious- 
ness, has  led  to  literary  pranks  and  freaks  without 
number.  Occasionally  this  has  borne  good  re- 
sults, more  often  it  has  merely  startled.  The 
bizarre  has  frequently  been  mistaken  for  the 
subtle;  unselective  treatment  has  been  too  often 
considered  realism.  The  Imagists,  straying  too 
far  in  search  of  flowers  of  vividness  and  colour, 
have  ended  by  losing  themselves  in  a  Plutonian 
darkness  of  unrelated  sensory  phenomena:  they 
predicate  a  world  of  sharply  separate  entities 
without  connective  tissue  of  relationship,  and,  in 
addition,  have  sacrificed  a  large  part  of  their  power 
to  convey  this  vision  by  their  unwillingness  or 
inability  to  heighten  their  readers'  receptiveness 


SCEPTICISMS 

through  playing  upon  it  rhythmically.  Members 
of  the  "Others"  group  (if  Mr.  Kreymborg  will 
permit  it  to  be  so  called)  have  sometimes  seemed 
determined  to  revert  to  the  holophrastic  method  of 
self-expression  which  antedated  the  evolution  of 
analytical  self-expression  and  language.  At  its 
worst,  the  result  has  been  captivating  nonsense; 
at  its  best,  it  gives  us  the  peculiarly  individual 
semi-poems  of  Wallace  Stevens  and  Maxwell 
Bodenheim. 

This  has  been  the  background — of  rapid  change 
and  experimentation,  extravagance,  over-decora- 
tiveness,  variety,  and  fearless  entrance  into  the 
penetralia  of  life — against  which  our  major  group 
of  Frost,  Masters,  Fletcher,  Amy  Lowell,  and 
Robinson  have  made  themselves  clear.  They 
cannot  be  detached  from  that  background.  They 
are  constantly  modifying  it,  and  being  modified 
by  it.  A  process  of  mutual  protective  colouration, 
of  co-adaptation,  is  constantly  going  on.  Where 
they  fear,  they  imitate.  In  consequence  we 
should  expect  to  find  the  faults  as  well  as  the 
virtues  of  the  background  repeated  in  the  pro- 
tagonists,— and  we  do.  With  the  exception  of 
Mr.  Frost  (and  even  he  has  been  slightly  infected 
on  the  metrical  side)  and  Mr.  Robinson,  our 

£623 


POETRY    IN   AMERICA 

leading  poets,  one  and  all,  seem  to  be  writing  with 
a  constantly  shifting  set  of  values  in  mind :  their 
eyes  are  on  their  audience  and  on  their  rival  poets, 
but  seldom  if  ever  on  eternal  principles.  The  re- 
sult is  a  kaleidoscopic  effect  of  shifting  viewpoints, 
and  it  has  become  typical  of  our  most  typical  poets 
that  their  work  seems  to  proceed  not  from  one  cen- 
tre, but  from  many.  Now  it  is  lyric,  now  it  is 
narrative,  now  dramatic,  or  philosophic,  or  psy- 
chological— and  as  the  mood  fluctuates  so  does  the 
vehicle  chosen,  from  the  most  formal  through  suc- 
cessively more  loosely  organized  modes  to  the 
gnomic  prose  of  "Spoon  River"  or  "The  Ghosts  of 
an  Old  House."  Our  poets  have  not  quite  found 
themselves.  They  are  casting  about  for  some- 
thing, they  do  not  know  what,  and  have  not  found 
it.  And  more  than  anything  else  it  is  this  fact 
that  gives  their  work  that  unfinished,  hurried  qual- 
ity, impatient  and  restless,  rapidly  unselective, 
which  makes  it  appear,  beside  English  work,  lack- 
ing in  distinction.  Like  the  spring  torrent,  it  is 
still  muddy. 

It  would  be  foolish  to  lament  this  fact.  The 
Spring  freshet  has  its  compensations  of  power  and 
fulness.  It  would  be  equally  foolish  to  delude 
ourselves  about  it,  to  imagine  that  we  are  already 


SCEPTICISMS 

in  the  middle  of  a  Golden  Age;  up  to  the  present 
point  it  is,  rather,  an  age  of  brass, — of  bombast 
and  self-trumpetings.  In  the  meantime,  we  can 
look  to  the  future  with  considerable  confidence 
that  out  of  the  present  unprincipled  chaos,  rich 
in  energies,  we  shall  yet  create  a  harmony.  And 
we  can  take  comfort  in  a  relatively  serene  belief 
that  Mr.  Braithwaite's  "Anthology  of  Magazine 
Verse"  very  seriously  misrepresents — or,  rather, 
hardly  represents  at  all — the  true  state  of  poetry 
in  America  today. 


IV 

The  Two  Magics:  Edgar  Lee 
Masters 

MR.  MASTERS  is  a  welcome,  though 
perplexing,  figure  in  contemporary 
American  poetry.  Welcome,  because 
along  with  Mr.  Frost,  and  perhaps  Mr.  Robinson 
and  Mr.  Sandburg,  he  is  a  realist,  and  because  a 
vigorous  strain  of  realism  is  so  profoundly  needed 
in  our  literature  today — as  indeed  it  has  always 
been  needed.  Perplexing,  because  his  relative 
importance,  as  posterity  will  see  it,  is  so  extraor- 
dinarily difficult  to  gauge.  Of  his  welcome  there 
can  be  no  question.  There  has  been  a  disposition 
among  poets  and  critics  of  poetry  during  the  last 
three  years  to  assume  that  the  most  important 
changes,  or  revolutions,  taking  place  in  American 
poetry  at  present  are  those  that  regard  form. 
The  Imagists  and  other  free  verse  writers  have 
found  their  encomiasts,  and  to  them  the  renewed 
vitality  of  American  poetry  has  in  consequence 


SCEPTICISMS 

been  a  little  too  freely  ascribed.  No  one  will 
deny  that  the  current  changes  in  poetic  form — 
the  earlier  blind  revolt,  the  later  effort  to  mint 
new  forms  which  shall  be  organic — have  their 
value.  But  we  should  not  forget  that  of  equal 
and  possibly  greater  importance  has  been  the  at- 
tempt of  our  realists  to  alter  not  merely  the  form 
of  poetry  but  also  its  content.  What  Mr.  Mase- 
field  and  Mr.  Gibson  did  in  England,  it  remained 
for  Mr.  Masters  and  Mr.  Frost  to  do  in  America. 
The  influence  of  "Spoon  River  Anthology"  and 
"North  of  Boston"  can  hardly  yet  be  estimated. 
That  the  Imagists  did  not  share  in  this  influence 
was  perhaps  merely  an  accident.  There  was 
nothing  in  the  Imagist  platform  to  prevent  it.  It 
simply  happened  that  the  Imagists  were  without 
exception  lyric  poets,  or  more  specifically,  poets  in 
the  decorative  or  colouristic  tradition.  While  they 
were  still  experimenting  with  new  rhythms  as  the 
vehicle  of  expression  for  a  gamut  of  perceptions 
and  sensations  which  differed  from  the  traditional 
perceptions  and  sensations  of  poetry  only  by  being 
a  trifle  subtler  and  more  objective,  Mr.  Masters 
and  Mr.  Frost,  without  so  much  as  a  preliminary 
blast  of  the  trumpet,  suddenly  incorporated  into 
their  poetry  a  new  world — the  world  of  the  in- 

£663 


EDGAR    LEE    MASTERS 

dividual  consciousness  in  its  complex  entirety. 
At  the  moment,  this  was  a  new  conception  of  the 
nature  of  poetry.  A  poem  was  not  to  be  a  single 
jewel  of  colourful  phrases,  but  the  jewel  in  its 
matrix.  Of  such  poetry,  it  is  readily  seen,  the 
appeal  would  be  not  merely  aesthetic,  but  in- 
tellectual and  emotional  also — in  the  richest 
sense,  human.  The  distinction  between  the  poetic 
and  the  non-poetic  vocabulary  was  broken  down, 
a  condition  which  has  obtained  conspicuously  only 
in  two  preceding  poetic  eras,  the  Chaucerian  and 
Elizabethan.  The  opportunity  for  a  transfusion 
of  vitality  from  our  tremendously  increased  prose 
vocabulary  to  the  comparatively  small  and  static 
poetic  vocabulary  was  unparalleled.  New  devel- 
opments of  form  were  involved,  perhaps,  but 
while  the  immediate  effects  of  these  were  more 
obvious,  it  is  to  be  questioned  whether  they  were 
as  far-reaching.  It  is  safe  to  say  that  no  poet  now 
writing  in  this  country  has  escaped  this  influence. 
In  its  healthily  acrid  presence  it  has  been  increas- 
ingly difficult  for  the  prettifiers,  the  airy  treaders 
of  preciosity,  the  disciples  of  sweetness  and  senti- 
ment, to  go  their  mincing  ways.  Most  of  them 
have  felt  a  compulsion  either  to  change  tone  or 
to  be  silent. 

[673 


SCEPTICISMS 

In  view  of  the  importance  of  this  influence, 
therefore,  it  is  interesting  to  speculate  on  the 
nature  and  function  of  realistic  poetry;  and  the 
work  of  Mr.  Masters  furnishes  an  excellent  oppor- 
tunity. To  say  that  such  work  as  this  delights 
us,  at  its  best,  because  it  is  human,  is  after  all 
somewhat  superficial.  In  a  broad  sense,  even  the 
most  treble  of  dawn-twitterers  is  human.  But 
clearly  the  pleasure  it  affords  us  is  a  different  sort 
of  pleasure  from  that  afforded,  say,  by  a  lyric  of 
Becquer  or  Shelley.  It  has,  when  it  is  good,  a 
clearly  recognizable  magic;  but  this  magic  is  not 
quite  of  the  same  character  as  that  we  associate 
with  "Kubla  Khan"  or  "The  Ode  to  a  Grecian 
Urn."  Matthew  Arnold  in  his  essay  on  poetry 
was  apparently  insensible  to  this  distinction,  for 
at  least  one  of  his  famous  touchstone  lines  belongs 
rather  to  the  realistic  than  to  the  lyric  category  of 
magic.  The  line  of  Wordsworth,  "And  never 
lifted  up  a  single  stone,"  certainly  does  not  ap- 
peal, in  any  clear  way,  to  the  sense  of  beauty; 
its  felicity  is  of  a  different  sort.  What  precisely 
constitutes  this  second  sort  of  verbal  magic  is  in 
the  present  state  of  psychology  perhaps  impossible 
to  analyse.  At  most  we  can  perceive  certain  re- 
lations and  distinctions.  On  one  plane,  the 

C68J 


EDGAR    LEE    MASTERS 

mechanism  of  the  two  is  identical:  both  depend 
for  their  effect  on  the  choice  of  so  sharply  char- 
acteristic a  single  detail  that  a  powerful  motor 
reaction  will  ensue  and  complete  the  sensory  pat- 
tern in  its  entirety.  This  is  known  as  Pavlov's 
law.  But  here  begins  the  divergence,  for  while 
this  might  explain  the  quality  of  vividness  which 
is  common  to  both,  it  appears  to  have  no  bearing 
on  the  fact  that  each  sort  of  vividness  affects  the 
reader  in  a  specifically  different  manner.  The 
first,  or  Shelley-Becquer  type  of  magic,  appeals 
to  what  is  indefinitely  called  the  sense  of  beauty; 
the  second,  or  Masters-Frost  type,  appeals  perhaps 
to  the  sense  of  reality.  These  terms  are  deplor- 
ably vague.  Our  enjoyment  of  art  is  consequent 
upon  the  satisfaction  of  two  kinds  of  hunger: 
hunger  for  beauty  and  hunger  for  knowledge. 
Let  what  the  Freudians  call  an  emotional  complex 
be  formed  early  in  life  upon  the  frustrated  first 
of  these  hungers,  and  we  get  a  lyric  or  colourist 
type  of  artist;  upon  the  other,  and  we  get  a  realist. 
Mr.  Masters  is  of  the  latter  type,  though  there 
are  traces  in  him  of  the  former  as  well.  The 
curious  thing  is  that  while  he  frequently  manifests 
a  vivid  desire  to  employ  the  lyric  kind  of  magic, 
he  nearly  always  fails  at  it ;  his  average  of  success 

C69H 


SCEPTICISMS 

with  the  realistic  magic  is  consistently  very  much 
higher.  He  is  essentially  a  digger-out  of  facts, 
particularly  of  those  facts  which  regard  the 
mechanism  of  human  character.  In  the  presence 
of  richly  human  material — the  sufferings,  the  de- 
spairs, the  foolish  illusions,  the  amazing  overween- 
ings  of  the  individual  man  or  woman — he  has  the 
cold  hunger  of  the  microscope.  Curiosity  is  his 
compelling  motive,  not  the  desire  for  beauty.  He 
is  insatiable  for  facts  and  events,  for  the  secrets 
of  human  behaviour.  Consequently  it  is  as  a 
narrator  that  he  does  his  best  work.  He  is  essen- 
tially a  psychological  story-teller,  one  who  has 
chosen  for  his  medium  not  prose  but  verse,  a 
tumbling  and  jostling  and  overcrowded  sort  of 
verse,  which,  to  be  sure,  frequently  becomes  prose. 
Was  Mr.  Masters  wise  in  making  this  choice*? 
He  is  by  nature  extremely  loquacious  and  discur- 
sive— it  appears  to  be  painful  for  him  to  cut  down 
to  mere  essentials — and  prose  would  seem  to  be  a 
more  natural  medium  for  such  a  mind.  But 
while  he  almost  always  fails  to  compress  his  ma- 
terial to  the  point  where  it  becomes  singly  power- 
ful, it  is  only  the  fact  that  he  uses  a  verse  form 
which  compels  him  to  compress  at  all;  and  it  is 
also  clear  that  at  his  moments  of  keenest  pleasure 

OH 


EDGAR    LEE    MASTERS 

in  dissective  narration  he  can  only  experience  satis- 
faction in  a  verse  of  sharply  accentuated  ictus.  It 
is  at  these  moments  that  his  work  takes  on  the 
quality  of  realistic  magic,  the  magic  of  vivid  ac- 
tion, dramatic  truthfulness,  muscular  reality. 
We  are  made  to  feel  powerfully  the  thrust  and 
fecundity  of  human  life,  particularly  its  animal- 
ism; we  are  also  made  to  feel  its  struggle  to  be,  or 
to  believe  itself,  something  more.  It  is  in  the 
perception  and  expression  of  this  something  more 
that  Mr.  Masters  chiefly  fails,  not  because  he  is 
not  aware  of  it  (he  repeatedly  makes  it  clear  that 
he  is,  though  not  of  course  in  the  guise  of  senti- 
mentality) but  because  at  this  point  his  power 
and  felicity  of  expression  abandon  him.  What 
emotional  compulsion  he  has  towards  self-expres- 
sion lies  in  the  other  direction.  His  temperament 
might  be  compared  not  inexactly  to  that  of 
Hogarth,  the  Hogarth  of  "Marriage  a  la  Mode" 
and  "The  Rake's  Progress"  rather  than  of  the 
caricatures.  It  is  in  the  Hogarthian  type  of  magic 
that  he  is  most  proficient. 

Is  it  certain  however  that  this  proficiency  is 
sufficient  to  make  his  work  enduring4?  There  is 
no  other  poet  in  America  today  whose  work  is  so 
amazingly  uneven,  whose  sense  of  values  is  so 


SCEPTICISMS 

disconcertingly  uncertain.  While  in  some  re- 
spects Mr.  Master's  intellectual  equipment  is 
richer  than  that  of  any  of  his  rivals,  it  has  about 
it  also  something  of  the  nouveau  riche.  Much 
of  his  erudition  seems  only  half  digested,  much 
of  it  is  inaccurate,  much  of  it  smells  of  quackery 
or  the  woman's  page  of  the  morning  paper. 
Much  of  it  too  is  dragged  in  by  the  heels  and  is 
very  dull  reading.  Moreover,  this  uncertainty- 
one  might  almost  say  unripeness — besets  Mr. 
Masters  on  the  aesthetic  plane  quite  as  clearly  as 
on  the  intellectual.  To  put  it  synaesthetically, 
he  appears  not  to  know  a  yellow  word  from  a 
purple  one.  He  goes  from  a  passage  of  great 
power  to  a  passage  of  bathos,  from  the  vividly 
true  to  the  blatantly  false,  from  the  incisive  to 
the  dull,  without  the  least  awareness.  In  "Songs 
and  Satires"  one  passes,  in  bewilderment,  from 
"Arabel,"  remarkably  sustained  in  atmosphere, 
vivid  in  its  portraiture,  skilful  in  its  use  of 
suspense,  to  the  ludicrous  ineffectual ity  of  the 
Launcelot  poem,  in  which  many  solemn  events 
are  unintentionally  comic.  In  "Toward  the 
Gulf,"  one  passes,  with  the  same  astonishment, 
from  the  utter  falseness  and  preposterous  anti- 
climax of  the  "Dialogue  at  Perko's"  to  the  in- 


EDGAR   LEE    MASTERS 

tensity  and  magic  of  "The  Widow  LaRue."  This 
means  of  course  that  Mr.  Masters  is  not  in  the 
thorough  sense  an  artist.  He  does  not  know  the 
effect  of  what  he  is  doing.  He  is  indeed,  as  an 
artist,  careless  to  the  point  of  recklessness.  It  is 
as  if  a  steam  dredge  should  become  pearl  diver: 
he  occasionally  finds  an  oyster,  sometimes  a  pearl ; 
but  he  drags  up  also  an  amazing  amount  of  mud. 
His  felicities  and  monstrosities  are  alike  the  acci- 
dents of  temperament,  not  the  designs  of  art. 
Hasty  composition  is  repeatedly  manifest.  Six 
months  more  of  reflection  would  perhaps  have 
eliminated  such  poems  as  "The  Canticle  of  the 
Race"  (Mr.  Masters  is  often  in  the  hands  of 
demons  when  he  uses  rhyme),  "The  Awakening," 
"In  the  Garden  at  the  Dawn  Hour,"  "Dear  Old 
Dick,"  "Toward  the  Gulf,"  and  two  or  three 
others;  a  good  half  of  "Songs  and  Satires";  per- 
haps a  third  of  "Spoon  River";  and  would  have 
disclosed  to  him  such  verbal  errors  as  "disregard- 
less"  and  "forgerer" — trifles,  indeed,  but  symp- 
tomatic. 

And  yet  on  the  whole  one  is  more  optimistic 
as  to  the  future  of  Mr.  Masters  after  reading 
his  latest  book  than  at  any  time  since  the  appear- 
ance of  "Spoon  River  Anthology."  Bad  and  good 


SCEPTICISMS 

are  still  confounded,  but  in  more  encouraging  pro- 
portions. From  "Widow  LaRue,"  "Front  the 
Ages  with  a  Smile,"  "Tomorrow  is  my  Birthday," 
"Saint  Deseret"  one  gets  an  almost  unmixed 
pleasure.  In  these  one  feels  the  magic  of  reality. 
These  poems,  like  "Arabel"  and  "In  the  Cage," 
are  synthesized;  and  it  is  in  this  vein  that  one 
would  like  to  see  Mr.  Masters  continue,  avoiding 
the  pitfalls  of  the  historical,  the  philosophical,  the 
pseudo-scientific.  Will  he  yet  learn  to  employ, 
as  an  artist,  the  selection  and  compression  which 
in  the  "Spoon  River  Anthology"  were  forced 
upon  him  by  the  exigencies  of  the  case*?  Will 
he  continue  at  the  same  time  to  develop  in  psycho- 
logical richness  and  in  his  sense  of  the  music  of 
sound  and  the  balance  of  form?  .  .  .  Whether 
he  does  or  not,  we  already  have  reason  to  be  pro- 
foundly grateful  to  him.  His  influence  has  been 
widespread  and  wholesome.  We  are  badly  in 
need  of  poets  who  are  unafraid  to  call  a  spade  a 
damned  shovel.  And  a  good  many  of  us  are  too 
ready  to  forget  that  realistic  magic  is  quite  as 
legitimate  in  poetry  as  lyric  magic,  and  quite  as 
clearly  in  the  English  tradition.  If  art  is  the 
effort  of  man  to  understand  himself  by  means  of 
self-expression,  then  surely  it  should  not  be  all 

[743 


EDGAR    LEE    MASTERS 

ghosts  and  cobwebs  and  soul-stuff.  .  .  .  Mr. 
Masters  reminds  us  that  we  are  both  complex  and 
physical. 


C75J 


The  Function    of   Rhythm: 
Ford  Madox  Hueffer 


I 


N  the  preface  to  his  latest  book  of  poems, 
"On  Heaven,"  Mr.  Ford  Madox  Hueffer  re- 
marks : 


The  greater  part  of  the  book  is,  I  notice  on  putting  it 
together,  in  either  vers  libre  or  rhymed  vers  libre.  I  am 
not  going  to  apologize  for  this  or  to  defend  vers  libre  as 
such.  It  is  because  I  simply  can't  help  it.  Vers  libre  is 
the  only  medium  in  which  I  can  convey  any  more  inti- 
mate moods.  Vers  libre  is  a  very  jolly  medium  in  which 
to  write  and  to  read,  if  it  be  read  conversationally  and 
quietly.  And  anyhow,  symmetrical  or  rhymed  verse  is 
for  me  a  cramped  and  difficult  medium — or  an  easy  and 
uninteresting  one. 

One  recollects  further,  that  Mr.  Hueffer  has  in 
the  past  been  also  insistent,  in  theory  and  in  prac- 
tice, on  the  point  that  poetry  should  be  at  least  as 
well  written  as  prose — that,  in  other  words,  it 
[76] 


FORD    MADOX    HUEFFER 

must  be  good  prose  before  it  can  be  good  poetry. 
Taken  together,  these  ideas  singularly  echo  a  pre- 
face written  one  hundred  and  twenty  odd  years 
ago — Wordsworth's  preface  to  the  "Lyrical  Bal- 
lads." In  the  appendix  to  that  volume  Words- 
worth, it  will  be  recalled,  remarked  that  in  works 
of  imagination  the  ideas,  in  proportion  as  they  are 
valuable,  whether  in  prose  or  verse,  "require  and 
exact  one  and  the  same  language."  And  through- 
out he  insisted  on  doing  away  with  all  merely 
decorative  language  and  on  using  the  speech  of 
daily  life. 

On  the  matter  of  metre  or  rhythm,  however,  the 
two  poets  are  not  so  entirely  in  agreement  as  they 
might  appear  to  be.  They  are  in  agreement,  it 
might  be  said,  just  in  so  far  as  they  both  seem 
inclined  to  regard  the  question  of  rhythm  as  only 
of  minor  or  incidental  importance.  "Metre,"  said 
Wordsworth,  "is  only  adventitious  to  composi- 
tion." Mr.  Hueffer,  as  is  seen  above,  candidly 
admits  that  he  avoids  the  strictest  symmetrical 
forms  because  to  use  them  well  is  too  difficult. 
Do  both  poets  perhaps  underestimate  the  value  of 
rhythm?  In  the  light  of  the  widespread  vogue  of 
free  verse  at  present,  it  is  a  question  interesting  to 
speculate  upon.  And  Mr.  Hueffer's  poems, 

C77] 


SCEPTICISMS 

which  are  excellent,  afford  us  a  pleasant  oppor- 
tunity. 

Wordsworth's  theory  as  to  the  function  of 
rhythm  was  peculiar.  He  believed  that  as  poetry 
consists  usually  in  a  finer  distillation  of  the  emo- 
tions than  is  found  in  prose,  some  check  must  be 
used  lest  the  excitation  arising  therefrom,  whether 
pleasurable  or  painful,  exceed  desired  bounds. 
Rhythm  is  to  act  as  a  narcotic.  "The  co-expres- 
sion of  something  regular,  something  to  which  the 
mind  has  been  accustomed  ...  in  a  less  excited 
state  cannot  but  have  great  efficacy  in  tempering 
.  .  .  the  passion  by  an  admixture  of  ordinary 
feeling.  .  .  ."  Only  by  way  of  incidental  emen- 
dation did  Wordsworth  suggest  that  in  some  cases 
metre  might  "contribute  to  impart  passion  to  the 
words."  This  is  perhaps  to  put  the  cart  before 
the  horse.  Mr.  Hueffer,  on  the  other  hand,  while 
equally  regarding,  or  appearing  to  regard,  metre 
as  a  subsidiary  element,  raises  a  different  and 
subtler  objection  to  it.  In  common  with  a  good 
many  champions  of  free  verse  he  feels  that  -free 
verse  is  better  than  symmetrical  verse  for  the  con- 
veyance of  more  intimate  moods.  This  is  a 
plausible  and  intriguing  theory.  At  first  glimpse 
it  seems  only  natural  that  in  a  freer  and  more  dis- 
[783 


FORD    MADOX    HUEFFER 

cursive  medium  the  poet  should  find  himself  better 
able  to  fix  upon  the  more  impalpable  nuances  of 
feeling.  But  a  steadier  inspection  leaves  one  not 
quite  so  sure.  If  one  can  convey  subtler  moods  in 
free  verse  than  in  symmetrical  verse,  might  one 
not  logically  argue  that  prose  could  be  subtler  still 
than  either?  And  we  should  have  reached  the 
conclusion  that  poetry  should  employ,  to  reach  its 
maximum  efficiency,  not  only  the  language  but 
also  the  rhythms  of  prose — in  other  words,  that  it 
should  be  prose. 

The  logic  is  perhaps  not  impeccable;  but  it  is 
sufficiently  strong  to  suggest  the  presence  of  some 
error.  If  prose  could  convey  subtler  emotional 
moods  and  impressions  than  poetry,  why  write 
poetry?  We  suspect  however  that  the  reverse  is 
true,  and  that  it  is  poetry  which  possesses  the 
greater  and  subtler  power  of  evocation.  But  the 
language  is,  largely  speaking,  the  same  in  both. 
And  consequently  we  must  assume  that  this 
superior  quality  of  evocativeness  or  magic  which 
we  associate  with  poetry  has  something  to  do  with 
the  fact  that,  more  artfully  than  in  prose,  the 
language  is  arranged.  And  this  arrangement  is, 
obviously,  in  great  part  a  matter  of  rhythm. 

This  brings  us  back,  accordingly,  to  the  after- 

[793 


SCEPTICISMS 

thought  in  Wordsworth's  appendix  to  the  Lyrical 
Ballads — the  idea  that  metre  may  impart 
"passion"  to  words.  The  truth  of  this  seems 
irrefragable.  When  a  poet,  therefore,  discards 
rhythm  he  is  discarding  perhaps  the  most  powerful 
single  artifice  of  poetry  which  is  at  his  disposal— 
the  particular  artifice,  moreover,  which  more  than 
any  other  enables  the  poet  to  obtain  a  psychic 
control  over  his  reader,  to  exert  a  sort  of  hypnosis 
over  him.  Rhythm  is  persuasive;  it  is  the  very 
stuff  of  life.  It  is  not  surprising  therefore  that 
things  can  be  said  in  rhythm  which  otherwise  can- 
not be  said  at  all;  paraphrase  a  fine  passage  of 
poetry  into  prose  and  in  the  dishevelment  the 
ghost  will  have  escaped.  A  good  many  cham- 
pions of  free  verse  would  perhaps  dispute  this. 
They  would  fall  back  on  the  theory  that,  at  any 
rate,  certain  moods  more  colloquial  and  less  in- 
tense than  those  of  the  highest  type  of  poetry,  and 
less  colloquial  and  more  intense  than  those  of  the 
highest  type  of  prose,  could  find  their  aptest  ex- 
pression in  this  form  which  lies  halfway  between. 
But  even  here  their  position  will  not  be  altogether 
secure,  at  least  in  theory.  Is  any  contemporary 
poetry  more  colloquial  or  intimate  than  that  of 


FORD    MADOX    HUEFFER 

T.  S.  Eliot,  who  is  predominantly  a  metrical  poet? 
It  is  doubtful.  Metrical  verse,  in  other  words, 
can  accomplish  anything  that  free  verse  can,  and 
can  do  it  more  persuasively.  What  we  in- 
evitably come  to  is  simply  the  fact  that  for  some 
poets  free  verse  is  an  easier  medium  than  metrical 
verse,  and  consequently  allows  them  greater  effi- 
ciency. It  is  desirable  therefore  that  such  poets 
should  employ  free  verse.  They  only  transgress 
when  they  argue  from  this  that  free  verse  is  the 
finer  form.  This  it  is  not. 

The  reasons  for  this  would  take  us  beyond  the 
mere  question  of  rhythm.  When  Wordsworth 
remarked  that  one  could  re-read  with  greater 
pleasure  a  painful  or  tragic  passage  of  poetry  than 
a  similar  passage  of  prose,  although  he  mistakenly 
ascribed  this  as  altogether  due  to  the  presence  of 
metre,  he  nevertheless  touched  closely  upon  the 
real  principle  at  issue.  For  compared  with  the 
pleasure  derived  from  the  reading  of  prose,  the 
pleasure  of  reading  poetry  is  two-natured :  in  addi- 
tion to  the  pleasure  afforded  by  the  ideas  presented, 
or  the  material  (a  pleasure  which  prose  equally  af- 
fords), there  is  also  the  more  purely  aesthetic  de- 
light of  the  art  itself,  a  delight  which  might  be  de- 


SCEPTICISMS 

scribed  as  the  sense  of  perfection  in  complexity,  or 
the  sense  of  arrangement.  This  arrangement  is 
not  solely  a  question  of  rhythm.  It  is  also  con- 
cerned with  the  selection  of  elements  in  the  lang- 
uage more  vividly  sensuous  and  with  the  more 
adroit  combination  of  ideas  with  a  view  to  setting 
them  off  to  sharper  advantage.  Given  two  poems 
in  which  the  theme  is  equally  delightful  and  effec- 
tive on  the  first  reading,  that  poem  of  the  two 
which  develops  the  theme  with  the  richer  and 
more  perfect  complexity  of  technique  will  longer 
afford  pleasure  in  re-reading.  It  is,  in  other 
words,  of  more  permanent  value. 

Mr.  Hueffer  confesses  in  advance  that  he  pre- 
fers a  less  to  a  more  complex  form  of  art.  As  a 
matter  of  fact  Mr.  Hueffer  is  too  modest.  When 
he  speaks  of  free  verse  he  does  not  mean,  to  the 
extent  in  which  it  is  usually  meant,  verse  without 
rhythm.  At  his  freest  he  is  not  far  from  a 
genuinely  rhythmic  method;  and  in  many  respects 
his  sense  of  rhythm  is  both  acute  and  individual. 
Three  poems  in  his  latest  book  would  alone  make 
it  worth  printing:  "Antwerp,"  which  is  one  of  the 
three  or  four  brilliant  poems  inspired  by  the  war; 
"Foot-sloggers,"  which  though  not  so  good  is  none 
the  less  very  readable;  and  "On  Heaven,"  the 

C82] 


FORD    MADOX    HUEFFER 

poem  which  gives  the  volume  its  name.  It  is  true 
that  in  all  three  of  these  poems  Mr.  Hueffer  very 
often  employs  a  rhythm  which  is  almost  as  dis- 
persed as  that  of  prose;  but  the  point  to  be  em- 
phatically remarked  is  that  he  does  so  only  by 
way  of  variation  on  the  given  norm  of  move- 
ment, which  is  essentially  and  predominantly 
rhythmic.  Variation  of  this  sort  is  no  more  or 
less  than  good  artistry;  and  Mr.  Hueffer  is  a 
very  competent  artist,  in  whose  hands  even  the 
most  captious  reader  feels  instinctively  and  at 
once  secure.  Does  he  at  times  overdo  the  dis- 
persal of  rhythm*?  Perhaps.  There  are  moments, 
in  "Antwerp"  and  in  "On  Heaven,"  when  the 
relief  of  the  reader  on  coming  to  a  forcefully 
rhythmic  passage  is  so  marked  as  to  make  him 
suspect  that  the  rhythm  of  the  passage  just  left 
was  not  forceful  enough.  Mr.  Hueffer  is  of  a 
discursive  temperament,  viewed  from  whatever 
angle,  and  this  leads  him  inevitably  to  over-in- 
clusiveness  and  moments  of  let-down.  One  feels 
that  a  certain  amount  of  cutting  would  improve 
both  "Antwerp"  and  "On  Heaven." 

Yet  one  would  hesitate  to  set  about  it  oneself. 
Both  poems  are  delightful.  Mr.  Hueffer  writes 
with  gusto  and  imagination,  and — what  is  perhaps 

[83] 


SCEPTICISMS 

rarer  among  contemporary  poets — with  tender- 
ness. "On  Heaven"  may  not  be  the  very  highest 
type  of  poetry — it  is  clearly  of  the  more  colloquial 
sort,  delightfully  expatiative,  skilful  in  its  use  of 
the  more  subdued  tones  of  prose — but  it  takes  hold 
of  one,  and  that  is  enough.  One  accepts  it  for 
what  it  is,  not  demanding  of  it  what  the  author 
never  intended  to  give  it — that  higher  degree  of 
perfection  in  intricacy,  that  more  intense  and  all- 
fusing  synthesis,  which  would  have  bestowed  on 
it  the  sort  of  beauty  that  more  permanently 
endures. 


VI 

The  Literary  Abbozzo:  Lola 
Ridge 

THE  Italians  use  the  word  abbozzo — mean- 
ing a  sketch  or  unfinished  work — not  only 
in  reference  to  drawing  or  painting  but 
also  as  a  sculptural  term.  The  group  of  un- 
finished sculptures  by  Michelangelo  in  Florence, 
for  example,  takes  this  name;  they  are  called 
simply  abbozzi.  The  stone  is  still  rough — the 
conception  has  only  just  begun  to  appear;  it  has 
not  yet  wholly  or  freely  emerged.  There  is  an 
impressiveness  in  the  way  in  which  the  powerful 
figures  seem  struggling  with  the  rock  for  release. 
And  it  is  no  wonder  that  Rodin  and  others  have 
seen  in  this  particular  stage  of  a  piece  of  sculpture 
a  hint  for  a  new  method  based  on  the  clear  enough 
aesthetic  value  of  what  might  be  called  the  pro- 
vocatively incomplete. 

Unfortunately,  in  literature  as  in  sculpture,  the 

[85] 


SCEPTICISMS 

vogue  of  the  incomplete  has  become  too  general, 
and  has  in  consequence  attracted  many  who  are 
without  a  clear  understanding  of  its  principles. 
Two  misconceptions  regarding  it  are  particularly 
common:  one,  that  it  is  relatively  formless,  and 
therefore  easier  than  a  method  more  precise;  the 
other,  that  it  is  a  universal  style,  applicable  to 
any  one  of  the  whole  gamut  of  themes.  Neither 
of  these  notions,  of  course,  is  true.  The  literary 
abbozzo — or  to  be  more  precise,  the  poetic  abbozzo 
— demands  a  high  degree  of  skill,  a  very  sure  in- 
stinct. And  it  should  be  equally  apparent  that  * 
it  is  properly  applicable  to  what  is  relatively  only 
a  small  number  of  moods  or  themes — among 
which  one  might  place  conspicuously  the  dithy- 
rambic  and  the  enumerative.  These  are  moods 
which  irregularity  will  often  save  from  monotony. 
Whitman's  catalogues  would  be  even  worse  than 
they  are  had  they  been  written  as  conscientiously 
in  heroic  couplets.  The  same  is  perhaps  true  of 
the  dithyrambs  of  Ossian.  Both  poets  to  have 
been  successful  in  a  more  skilfully  elaborate  style 
would  have  been  compelled  to  delete  a  great  deal 
.  .  .  which  would  no  doubt  have  been  an  im- 
provement. 

This    makes    one    a    little    suspicious    of    the 
[86] 


LOLA   RIDGE 

abbozzo :  is  it  possible  that  we  overrate  it  a  trifle"? 
Might  we  not  safely  suggest  to  those  artists  whom 
we  suspect  of  greatness,  or  even  of  very  great  skill 
merely,  that  their  employment  of  the  abbozzo 
should  be  chiefly  as  relaxation*?  But  they  will 
hardly  need  to  be  told.  The  provocatively  incom- 
plete— which  is  to  be  sharply  distinguished  from 
the  merely  truncated  or  slovenly — has  its  charm, 
its  beautiful  suggestiveness ;  but  in  proportion  as 
the  artist  is  powerful  he  will  find  the  abbozzo 
insufficient,  he  will  want  to  substitute  for  this 
charm,  this  delicate  hover,  a  beauty  and  strength 
more  palpable.  The  charm  which  inheres  in  the 
implied  rather  than  the  explicit  he  knows  how  to 
retain — he  will  retain  it  in  the  dim  counterpoint 
of  thought  itself. 

The  poems  of  Miss  Lola  Ridge  raise  all  these 
issues  sharply,  no  less  because  the  author  has  rich- 
ness and  originality  of  sensibility,  and  at  times 
brilliance  of  idea,  than  because  she  follows  this 
now  too  common  vogue  Here  is  a  vivid  per- 
sonality, even  a  powerful  one,  clearly  aware  of 
the  peculiar  experience  which  is  its  own — a  not 
too  frequent  gift.  It  rejoices  in  the  streaming  and 
garishly  lighted  multiplicity  of  the  city:  it  turns 
eagerly  toward  the  semi-tropical  fecundity  of  the 

[87] 


SCEPTICISMS 

meaner  streets  and  tenement  districts.  Here  it  is 
the  human  item  that  most  attracts  Miss  Ridge — 
Jews,  for  the  most  part,  seen  darkly  and  warmly 
against  a  background  of  social  consciousness,  of 
rebelliousness  even.  She  arranges  her  figures  for 
us  with  a  muscular  force  which  seems  masculine; 
it  is  singular  to  come  upon  a  book  written  by  a 
woman  in  which  vigour  is  so  clearly  a  more  natural 
quality  than  grace.  This  is  sometimes  merely 
strident,  it  is  true.  When  she  compares  Time  to 
a  paralytic,  "A  mildewed  hulk  above  the  nations 
squatting,"  one  fails  to  respond.  Nor  is  one 
moved  precisely  as  Miss  Ridge  might  hope  when 
she  tells  us  of  a  wind  which  "noses  among  them 
like  a  skunk  that  roots  about  the  heart."  It  is 
apparent  from  the  frequency  with  which  such 
falsities  occur — particularly  in  the  section  called 
"Labour" — that  Miss  Ridge  is  a  trifle  obsessed 
with  the  concern  of  being  powerful:  she  forgets 
that  the  harsh  is  only  harsh  when  used  sparingly, 
the  loud  only  loud  when  it  emerges  from  the  quiet. 
She  is  uncertain  enough  of  herself  to  deal  in  harsh- 
nesses wholesale  and  to  scream  them. 

But  with  due  allowances  made  for  these  extrava- 
gances— the  extravagances  of  the  brilliant  but 
somewhat  too  abounding  amateur — one  must  pay 

[88] 


LOLA   RIDGE 

one's  respects  to  Miss  Ridge  for  her  very  frequent 
verbal  felicities,  for  her  images  brightly  lighted, 
for  a  few  shorter  poems  which  are  clusters  of 
glittering  phrases,  and  for  the  human  richness  of 
one  longer  poem,  "The  Ghetto,"  in  which  the 
vigorous  and  the  tender  are  admirably  fused. 
Here  Miss  Ridge's  reactions  are  fullest  and 
truest.  Here  she  is  under  no  compulsion  to  be 
strident.  And  it  is  precisely  because  here  she  is 
relatively  most  successful  that  one  is  most  awk- 
wardly conscious  of  the  defects  inherent  in  the 
whole  method  for  which  Miss  Ridge  stands. 
This  is  a  use  of  the  "provocatively  incomplete" — 
as  concerns  form — in  which,  unfortunately,  the 
provocative  has  been  left  out.  If  we  consider 
again,  for  a  moment,  Michelangelo's  abbozzi,  we 
become  aware  how  slightly,  by  comparison,  Miss 
Ridge's  figures  have  begun  to  emerge.  Have  they 
emerged  enough  to  suggest  the  clear  overtone  of 
the  thing  completed*?  The  charm  of  the  incom- 
plete is  of  course  in  its  positing  of  a  norm  which 
it  suggests,  approaches,  retreats  from,  or  at  points 
actually  touches.  The  ghost  of  completeness 
alternately  shines  and  dims.  But  for  Miss  Ridge 
these  subtleties  of  form  do  not  come  forward. 
She  is  content  to  use  for  the  most  part  a  direct 

C89H 


SCEPTICISMS 

prose,  with  only  seldom  an  interpellation  of  the 
metrical,  and  the  metrical  of  a  not  particularly 
skilful  sort.  The  latent  harmonies  are  never 
evoked. 

One  hesitates  to  make  suggestions.  Miss  Ridge 
might  have  to  sacrifice  too  much  vigour  and  richness 
to  obtain  a  greater  beauty  of  form :  the  effort  might 
prove  her  undoing.  By  the  degree  of  her  success 
or  failure  in  this  undertaking,  however,  she  would 
become  aware  of  her  real  capacities  as  an  artist. 
Or  is  she  wise  enough  to  know  beforehand  that 
the  effort  would  be  fruitless,  and  that  she  has 
already  reached  what  is  for  her  the  right  pitch1? 
That  would  be  a  confession  but  it  would  leave  us, 
even  so,  a  wide  margin  for  gratitude. 


VII 

The  Melodic  Line:  D.  H. 
Lawrence 

IT  has  been  said  that  all  the  arts  are  constantly 
attempting,  within  their  respective  spheres, 
to  attain  to  something  of  the  quality  of 
music,  to  assume,  whether  in  pigment,  or  pencil, 
or  marble,  or  prose,  something  of  its  speed  and 
flash,  emotional  completeness,  and  well-har- 
monied  resonance;  but  of  no  other  single  art  is 
that  so  characteristically  or  persistently  true  as  it 
is  of  poetry.  Poetry  is  indeed  in  this  regard 
two-natured:  it  strikes  us,  when  it  is  at  its  best, 
quite  as  sharply  through  our  sense  of  the  musically 
beautiful  as  through  whatever  implications  it  has 
to  carry  of  thought  or  feeling:  it  plays  on  us 
alternately  or  simultaneously  through  sound  as 
well  as  through  sense.  The  writers  of  free  verse 
have  demonstrated,  to  be  sure,  that  a  poetry  suffi- 
ciently effective  may  be  written  in  almost  entire 


SCEPTICISMS 

disregard  of  the  values  of  pure  rhythm.  The 
poetry  of  "H.D."  is  perhaps  the  clearest  example 
of  this.  Severe  concentration  upon  a  damascene 
sharpness  of  sense-impression,  a  stripping  of  im- 
ages to  the  white  clear  kernel,  both  of  which  mat- 
ters can  be  more  meticulously  attended  to  if  there 
are  no  bafflements  of  rhythm  or  rhyme-pattern  to 
be  contended  with,  have,  to  a  considerable  extent, 
a  substitutional  value.  Such  a  poetry  attains  a 
vitreous  lucidity  which  has  its  own  odd  heatless 
charm.  But  a  part  of  its  charm  lies  in  its  very  act 
of  departure  from  a  norm  which,  like  a  back- 
ground or  undertone,  is  forever  present  for  it  in 
our  minds;  we  like  it  in  a  sense  because  of  its 
unique  perversity  as  a  variation  on  this  more 
familiar  order  of  rhythmic  and  harmonic  suspen- 
sions and  resolutions;  we  like  it  in  short  for  its 
novelty;  and  it  eventually  leaves  us  unsatisfied, 
because  this  more  familiar  order  is  based  on  a 
musical  hunger  which  is  as  profound  and  per- 
manent as  it  is  universal. 

When  we  read  a  poem  we  are  aware  of  this 
musical  characteristic,  or  analogy,  in  several  ways. 
The  poem  as  a  whole  in  this  regard  will  satisfy  us 
or  not  in  accordance  with  the  presence,  or  partial 
presence,  or  absence,  of  what  we  might  term 


D.    H.    LAWRENCE 

musical  unity.  The  "Ode  to  a  Nightingale"  is  an 
example  of  perfect  musical  unity;  the  "Ode  to  Au- 
tumn" is  an  example  of  partial  musical  unity, — 
partial  because  the  resolution  comes  too  soon,  the 
rate  of  curve  is  too  abruptly  altered;  many  of  the 
poems  by  contemporary  writers  of  free  verse — 
Fletcher,  or  Aldington,  or  "H.D." — illustrate 
what  we  mean  by  lack  of  musical  unity  or  in- 
tegration, except  on  the  secondary  plane,  the  plane 
of  what  we  might  call  orotundity;  and  the  most 
complete  lack  of  all  may  be  found  in  the  vast 
majority  of  Whitman's  poems.  This  particular 
sort  of  musical  quality  in  poetry  is,  however,  so 
nearly  identifiable  with  the  architectural  as  to  be 
hardly  separable  from  it.  It  is  usually  in  the 
briefer  movements  of  a  poem  that  musical  charm 
is  most  keenly  felt.  And  this  sort  of  brief  and 
intensely  satisfactory  musical  movement  we  might 
well  describe  as  something  closely  analogous  to 
what  is  called  in  musical  compositions  the  melodic 
line. 

By  melodic  line  we  shall  not  mean  to  limit  our- 
selves to  one  line  of  verse  merely.  Our  melodic 
line  may  be,  indeed,  one  line  of  verse,  or  half  a 
line,  or  a  group  of  lines,  or  half  a  page.  What 
we  have  in  mind  is  that  sort  of  brief  movement 


SCEPTICISMS 

when,  for  whatever  psychological  reason,  there  is 
suddenly  a  fusion  of  all  the  many  qualities,  which 
may  by  themselves  constitute  charm,  into  one  in- 
divisible magic.  Is  it  possible  for  this  psycho- 
logical change  to  take  place  without  entailing  an 
immediate  heightening  of  rhythmic  effect4?  Pos- 
sible, perhaps,  but  extremely  unlikely.  In  a  free 
verse  poem  we  shall  expect  to  see  at  such  moments 
a  very  much  closer  approximation  to  the  rhythm 
of  metrical  verse:  in  a  metrical  poem  we  shall 
expect  to  see  a  subtilization  of  metrical  effects,  a 
richer  or  finer  employment  of  vowel  and  con- 
sonantal changes  to  that  end.  Isolate  such  a 
passage  in  a  free  verse  poem  or  metrical  poem  and 
it  will  be  seen  how  true  this  is.  The  change  is 
immediately  perceptible,  like  the  change  from  a 
voice  talking  to  a  voice  singing.  The  change  is  as 
profound  in  time  as  it  is  in  tone,  yet  it  is  one  which 
escapes  any  but  the  most  superficial  analysis.  All 
we  can  say  of  it  is  that  it  at  once  alters  the  char- 
acter of  the  verse  we  are  reading  from  that  sort 
which  pleases  and  is  forgotten,  pleases  without 
disturbing,  to  that  sort  which  strikes  into  the  sub- 
conscious, gleams,  and  is  automatically  remem- 
bered. In  the  midst  of  the  rich  semi-prose  re- 
citative of  Fletcher's  White  Symphony,  for  ex- 

C943 


D.    H.    LAWRENCE 

ample,  a  recitative  which  charms  and  entices  but 
does  not  quite  enchant,  or  take  one's  memory,  one 
comes  to  the  following  passage : 

Autumn !     Golden  fountains, 

And  the  winds  neighing 

Amid  the  monotonous  hills ; 

Desolation  of  the  old  gods, 

Rain  that  lifts  and  rain  that  moves  away; 

In  the  green-black  torrent 

Scarlet  leaves. 

It  is  an  interlude  of  song  and  one  remembers  it. 
Is  this  due  to  an  intensification  of  rhythm1? 
Partly,  no  doubt,  but  not  altogether.  The  emo- 
tional heightening  is  just  as  clear,  and  the  unity 
of  impression  is  pronounced;  it  is  a  fusion  of  all 
these  qualities,  and  it  is  impossible  to  say  which 
is  the  primum  mobile.  As  objective  psychol- 
ogists all  we  can  conclude  is  that  in  what  is  con- 
spicuously a  magical  passage  in  this  poem  there  is 
a  conspicuous  increase  in  the  persuasiveness  of 
rhythm. 

This  is  equally  true  of  metrical  poetry.  It  is 
these  passages  of  iridescent  fusion  that  we  recall 
from  among  the  many  thousands  of  lines  we  have 
read.  One  has  but  to  summon  up  from  one's 
memory  the  odds  and  ends  of  poems  which  willy 

[95] 


SCEPTICISMS 

nilly  one  remembers,  precious  fragments  cherished 
by  the  jackdaw  of  the  subconscious: 

A  savage  spot  as  holy  and  enchanted 

As  e'er  beneath  a  waning  moon  was  haunted 

By  woman  wailing  for  her  demon-lover. 

I  have  seen  them  riding  seaward  on  the  waves 
Combing  the  white  hair  of  the  waves  blown  back 
When  the  wind  blows  the  water  white  and  black. 

Beauty  is  momentary  in  the  mind, — 
The  fitful  tracing  of  a  portal : 
But  in  the  flesh  it  is  immortal. 

And  shook  a  most  divine  dance  from  their  feet, 
That  twinkled  starlike,  moved  as  swift,  and  fine, 
And  beat  the  air  so  thin,  they  made  it  shine. 

Part  of  a  moon  was  falling  down  the  west 
Dragging  the  whole  sky  with  it  to  the  hills. 
Its  light  poured  softly  in  her  lap.     She  saw 
And  spread  her  apron  to  it.     She  put  out  her  hand 
Among  the  harp-like  morning-glory  strings, 
Taut  with  the  dew  from  garden-bed  to  eaves, 
As  if  she  played  unheard  the  tenderness 
That  wrought  on  him.  .  .  . 

Awakening  up,  he  took  her  hollow  lute, — 
Tumultuous, — and  in  chords  that  tenderest  be, 


D.    H.    LAWRENCE 

He  played  an  ancient  ditty  long  since  mute, 

In  Provence  called,  "La  Belle  Dame  Sans  Merci." 

Ay,  Mother,  Mother, 

What  is  this  Man,  thy  darling  kissed  and  cuffed, 
Thou  lustingly  engenders'!, 
To  sweat,  and  make  his  brag,  and  rot, 
Crowned  with  all  honours  and  all  shamef ulness  ? 
He  dogs  the  secret  footsteps  of  the  heavens, 
Sifts  in  his  hands  the  stars,  weighs  them  as  gold-dust, 
And  yet  is  he  successive  unto  nothing, 
But  patrimony  of  a  little  mould, 
And  entail  of  four  planks. 

And  suddenly  there's  no  meaning  in  our  kiss, 
And  your  lit  upward  face  grows,  where  we  lie, 
Lonelier  and  dreadfuller  than  sunlight  is, 
And  dumb  and  mad  and  eyeless  like  the  sky. 

All  of  these  excerpts,  mangled  as  they  are  by 
being  hewed  from  their  contexts,  have  in  a  notice- 
able degree  the  quality  of  the  "melodic  line." 
They  are  the  moments  for  which,  indeed,  we  read 
poetry ;  just  as  when  in  listening  to  a  modern  music 
however  complex  and  dissonantal,  it  is  after  "all 
the  occasionally-arising  brief  cry  of  lyricism  which 
thrills  and  dissolves  us.  When  the  subconscious 
speaks,  the  subconscious  answers. 

It  is  because  in  a  good  deal  of  contemporary 

[97] 


SCEPTICISMS 

poetry  the  importance  of  the  melodic  line  is  for- 
gotten that  this  brief  survey  has  been  made.  In 
our  preoccupations  with  the  many  technical  quar- 
rels, and  quarrels  as  to  aesthetic  purpose,  which 
have  latterly  embroiled  our  poets,  we  have,  I  think, 
a  little  lost  sight  of  the  fact  that  poetry  to  be 
poetry  must  after  all  rise  above  a  mere  efficiency 
of  charmingness,  or  efficiency  of  accuracy,  to  this 
sort  of  piercing  perfection  of  beauty  or  truth, 
phrased  in  a  piercing  perfection  of  music.  It  is  a 
wholesome  thing  for  us  to  study  the  uses  of  dis- 
sonance and  irregularity;  we  add  in  that  way, 
whether  sensuously  or  psychologically,  many  new 
tones;  but  there  is  danger  that  the  habit  will  grow 
upon  us,  that  we  will  forget  the  reasons  for  our 
adoption  of  these  qualities  and  use  them  passim 
and  without  intelligence,  or,  as  critics,  confer  a  too 
arbitrary  value  upon  them. 

The  poetry  of  Mr.  D.  H.  Lawrence  is  a  case 
very  much  in  point.  His  temperament  is  modern 
to  a  degree:  morbidly  self-conscious,  sex-crucified, 
an  affair  of  stretched  and  twanging  nerves.  He 
belongs,  of  course,  to  the  psychological  wing  of 
modern  poetry.  Although  we  first  met  him  as 
an  Imagist,  it  is  rather  with  T.  S.  Eliot,  or  Masters, 
or  the  much  gentler  Robinson,  all  of  whom  are  in  a 


D.    H.    LAWRENCE 

sense  lineal  descendants  of  the  Meredith  of 
"Modern  Love,"  that  he  belongs.  But  he  does 
not  much  resemble  any  of  these.  His  range  is 
extremely  narrow, — it  is  nearly  always  erotic, 
febrile  and  sultry  at  the  lower  end,  plangently 
philosophic  at  the  upper.  Within  this  range  he 
is  astonishingly  various.  No  mood  is  too  slight 
to  be  seized  upon,  to  be  thrust  under  his  myopic 
lens.  Here,  in  fact,  we  touch  his  cardinal  weak- 
ness: for  if  as  a  novelist  he  often  writes  like  a 
poet,  as  a  poet  he  far  too  often  writes  like  a 
novelist.  One  observes  that  he  knows  this  him- 
self— he  asks  the  reader  of  "Look!  We  Have 
Come  Through!"  to  consider  it  not  as  a  col- 
lection of  short  poems,  but  as  a  sort  of  novel 
in  verse.  No  great  rearrangement,  perhaps, 
would  have  been  necessary  to  do  the  same  thing 
for  "New  Poems"  or  "Amores,"  though  perhaps 
not  so  cogently.  More  than  most  poets  he  makes 
of  his  poetry  a  sequential,  though  somewhat  dis- 
jointed, autobiography.  And  more  than  almost 
any  poet  one  can  think  of,  who  compares  with 
him  for  richness  of  temperament,  he  is  unselective 
in  doing  so,  both  as  to  material  and  method. 

He  is,  indeed,  as  striking  an  example  as  one 
could  find  of  the  poet  who,  while  appearing  to  be 

199/1 


SCEPTICISMS 

capable  of  what  we  have  tailed  the  melodic  line, 
none  the  less  seems  to  be  unaware  of  the  value  and 
importance  of  it,  and  gives  it  to  us  at  random, 
brokenly,  half  blindly,  or  intermingled  with 
splintered  fragments  of  obscure  sensation  and  ex- 
traneous detail  dragged  in  to  fill  out  a  line.  A 
provoking  poet !  and  a  fatiguing  one :  a  poet  of  the 
demonic  type,  a  man  possessed,  who  is  swept 
helplessly  struggling  and  lashing  down  the  black 
torrent  of  his  thought;  alternately  frenzied  and 
resigned.  "A  poet,"  says  Santayana,  "who  merely 
swam  out  into  the  sea  of  sensibility,  and  tried  to 
picture  all  possible  things  .  .  .  would  bring 
materials  only  to  the  workshop  of  art;  he  would 
not  be  an  artist."  What  Santayana  had  in  mind 
was  a  poet  who  undertook  this  with  a  deliberate- 
ness — but  the  effect  in  the  case  of  Mr.  Lawrence 
is  much  the  same.  He  is  seldom  wholly  an  artist, 
even  when  his  medium  is  most  under  control.  It 
is  when  he  is  at  his  coolest,  often, — when  he  tries 
rhyme-pattern  or  rhythm-pattern  or  colour-pat- 
tern in  an  attempt  at  the  sort  of  icy  kaleidoscopics 
at  which  Miss  Lowell  is  adept, — that  he  is  most 
tortuously  and  harshly  and  artificially  and  alto- 
gether unreadably  at  his  worst.  Is  he  obsessed 
with  dissonance  and  oddity"?  It  would  seem  so. 


D.    H.    LAWRENCE 

His  rhymes  are  cruel,  sometimes,  to  the  verge  of 
murder. 

Yet,  if  he  is  not  wholly  an  artist,  he  is  certainly, 
in  at  least  a  fragmentary  sense,  a  brilliant  poet. 
Even  that  is  hardly  fair  enough:  the  two  more 
recent  volumes  contain  more  than  a  handful  of 
uniquely  captivating  poems.  They  have  a  curious 
quality, — tawny,  stark,  bitter,  harshly  coloured, 
salt  to  the  taste.  The  sadistic  element  in  them  is 
strong.  It  is  usually  in  the  love  poems  that  he  is 
best :  in  these  he  is  closest  to  giving  us  the  melodic 
line  that  comes  out  clear  and  singing.  Closest  in- 
deed; but  the  perfect  achievement  is  seldom.  The 
fusion  is  not  complete.  The  rhythms  do  not  alto- 
gether free  themselves,  one  feels  that  they  are 
weighted;  the  impressions  are  impetuously 
crowded  and  huddled;  and  as  concerns  the  com- 
manding of  words  Mr.  Lawrence  is  a  captain  of 
more  force  than  tact:  he  is  obeyed,  but  sullenly. 
Part  of  this  is  due,  no  doubt,  to  Mr.  Lawrence's 
venturings  among  moods  and  sensations  which  no 
poet  has  hitherto  attempted,  moods  secret  and 
obscure,  shadowy  and  suspicious.  This  is  to  his 
credit,  and  greatly  to  the  credit  of  poetry.  He  is 
among  the  most  original  poets  of  our  time, 
original,  that  is,  as  regards  sensibility;  he  has  given 

[101] 


SCEPTICISMS 

us  sombre  and  macabre  tones,  and  tones  of  a  cold 
and  sinister  clarity,  or  of  a  steely  passion,  which 
we  have  not  had  before.  His  nerves  are  raw,  his 
reactions  are  idiosyncratic :  what  is  clear  enough  to 
him  has  sometimes  an  unhealthily  mottled  look  to 
us, — esuriently  etched,  none  the  less.  But  a 
great  deal  of  the  time  he  over-reaches:  he  makes 
frequently  the  mistake  of,  precisely,  trying  too 
hard.  What  cannot  be  captured,  in  this  regard, 
it  is  no  use  killing.  Brutality  is  no  substitute  for 
magic.  One  must  take  one's  mood  alive  and  sing- 
ing, or  not  at  all. 

It  is  this  factor  which  in  the  poetry  of  Mr. 
Lawrence  most  persistently  operates  to  prevent  the 
attainment  of  the  perfect  melodic  line.  Again 
and  again  he  gives  us  a  sort  of  jagged  and  spangled 
flame;  but  the  mood  does  not  sing  quite  with  the 
naturalness  or  ease  one  would  hope  for,  it  has  the 
air  of  being  dazed  by  violence,  or  even  seems,  in 
the  very  act  of  singing,  to  bleed  a  little.  It  is  a 
trifle  too  easy  to  say  of  a  poet  of  whom  this  is  true 
that  the  fault  may  be  due  to  an  obtrusion  of  the 
intellect  among  the  emotions.  Such  terms  do  not 
define,  are  scarcely  separable.  Perhaps  it  would 
more  closely  indicate  the  difficulty  to  say  that  Mr. 
Lawrence  is  not  only,  as  all  poets  are,  a  curious 


D.    H.    LAWRENCE 

blending  of  the  psycho-analyst  and  patient,  but 
that  he  endeavours  to  carry  on  both  roles  at  once, 
to  speak  with  both  voices  simultaneously.  The 
soliloquy  of  the  patient — the  lyricism  of  the  sub- 
conscious— is  for  ever  being  broken  in  upon  by  the 
too  eager  inquisitions  of  the  analyst.  If  Mr.  Law- 
rence could  make  up  his  mind  to  yield  the  floor 
unreservedly  to  either,  he  would  be  on  the  one 
hand  a  clearer  and  more  magical  poet,  on  the 
other  hand  a  more  dependable  realist. 

One  wonders,  in  the  upshot,  whether  the  theme 
of  "Look!  We  have  Come  Through!"  had  better 
not  have  been  treated  in  prose.  The  story,  such 
as  it  is,  emerges,  it  is  true,  and  with  many  deli- 
ciously  clear  moments,  some  of  them  lyric  and 
piercing;  but  with  a  good  deal  that  remains  in 
question.  It  is  the  poet  writing  very  much  as  a 
novelist,  and  all  too  often  forgetting  that  the 
passage  from  the  novel  to  the  poem  is  among  other 
things  a  passage  from  the  cumulative  to  the  se- 
lective. Sensations  and  impressions  may  be 
hewed  and  hauled  in  prose;  but  in  poetry  it  is 
rather  the  sort  of  mood  which,  like  a  bird,  flies  out 
of  the  tree  as  soon  as  the  ax  rings  against  it,  that 
one  must  look  for.  Mr.  Lawrence  has,  of  this 
sort,  his  birds,  but  he  appears  to  pay  little  heed  to 


SCEPTICISMS 

them;  he  goes  on  chopping.  And  one  has,  even 
so,  such  a  delight  in  him  that  not  for  worlds  would 
one  intervene. 


[104;] 


VIII 

Possessor  and  Possessed:  John 
Gould  Fletcher 

THE  work  of  Mr.  John  Gould  Fletcher  has 
hardly  attained  the  eminence  in  contem- 
porary poetry  that  it  deserves.  One  is 
doubtful,  indeed,  whether  it  will.  For  not  only 
is  it  of  that  sort  which  inevitably  attracts  only  a 
small  audience,  but  it  is  also  singularly  uneven  in 
quality,  and  many  readers  who  would  like  Mr. 
Fletcher  at  his  best  cannot  muster  the  patience  to 
read  beyond  his  worst.  Mr.  Fletcher  is  his  own 
implacable  enemy.  He  has  not  yet  published  a 
book  in  which  his  excellent  qualities  are  single, 
candid,  and  undivided :  a  great  many  dead  leaves 
are  always  to  be  turned.  The  reward  for  the 
search  is  conspicuous,  but  unfortunately  it  is  one 
which  few  will  take  the  trouble  to  find. 

Mr.  Fletcher's  latest  book,  "The  Tree  of  Life"  is 
no  exception  to  this  rule :  it  is  perhaps,  if  we  leave 


SCEPTICISMS 

out  of  account  his  five  early  books  of  orthodox 
and  nugatory  self-exploration,  the  most  remark- 
ably uneven  of  them  all.  It  has  neither  the  level 
technical  excellence,  the  economical  terseness  of 
his  "Japanese  Prints,"  nor,  on  the  other  hand,  the 
amazing  flight  of  many  pages  in  "Goblins  and 
Pagodas."  Yet  certainly  one  would  rather  have 
it  than  "Japanese  Prints" ;  and  even  if  it  contains  a 
greater  proportion  of  dross  than  is  to  be  found  in 
the  symphonies,  it  has  compensating  qualities, 
qualities  which  one  feels  are  new  in  the  work  of 
Mr.  Fletcher,  and  which  make  one  hesitate  to  rate 
it  too  far  below  "Goblins  and  Pagodas,"  or,  at  any 
rate,  "Irradiations."  For  the  moment,  however,  it 
is  interesting  to  set  aside  these  new  qualities  and 
to  consider,  or  savour,  the  astonishing  unequalness 
which  alone  would  constitute  a  sort  of  distinction 
in  the  work  of  Mr.  Fletcher.  It  is  the  custom  in 
such  cases  to  say  that  the  poet  has  no  self-critical 
faculty,  and  to  let  it  go  at  that.  But  that  ex- 
planation is  of  a  general  and  vague  character,  and 
operates  only  under  the  fallacy  that  any  such  com- 
plex is  reducible  to  the  terms  of  a  single  factor. 
It  should  be  clear  that  any  given  complex  will 
consist  of  several  factors;  that  "absence  of  a  criti- 
cal faculty"  is  to  a  considerable  degree  a  merely 


JOHN    GOULD    FLETCHER 

negative  diagnosis;  and  that  perhaps  one  would 
wisely  look  for  a  more  express  clue  to  the  par- 
ticular personal  equation  in  something  more  posi- 
tive— as  for  example  in  some  excess  rather  than 
lack.  It  is  in  a  kind  of  redundancy,  on  the  psychic 
plane,  that  an  artist's  character  is  most  manifest. 
Here  will  lie  the  key  to  both  his  successes  and  his 
failures.  It  should  be  the  critic's  undertaking  to 
name  and  analyse  this  redundancy  and  to  ascer- 
tain the  degree  in  which  the  artist  has  it  under 
control. 

Unfortunately,  this  undertaking,  in  the  present 
state  of  psychology — and  criticism  is  a  branch  oi 
psychology — is  as  yet  highly  speculative;  it  bor- 
ders, indeed,  in  the  opinion  of  many,  on  the 
mythological.  Criticism  of  this  sort  must  be, 
confessedly,  supposititious.  Thus  in  the  case  of 
Mr.  Fletcher  we  shall  perhaps  find  the  most  sug- 
gestive light  cast  from  a  direction  which  to  many 
literary  folk  is  highly  suspect — from  psychology 
itself.  KostylefT,  it  will  be  recalled,  maintains 
that  a  very  important  part  of  the  mechanism  of 
poetic  inspiration  rests  in  the  automatic  discharge 
of  verbal  reflexes — the  initial  impulse  coming 
from  some  external  stimulus,  but  the  chain  of  ver- 
bal association  thereafter  unravelling  more  or  less 


SCEPTICISMS 

of  its  own  momentum,  and  leading,  as  far  as  any 
connection  of  thought  or  emotion  is  concerned, 
well  beyond  the  premises  of  the  original  stimulus. 
Of  course  Kostyleff  does  not  limit  himself  to  this. 
He  grants  that  it  is  only  a  peculiar  sensibility 
which  will  store  up,  as  in  the  case  of  a  poet,  such  a 
wealth  of  verbal  reflexes:  and  he  grants  further 
that  there  is  often — though  not  always — the 
initial  stimulus  from  without.  For  our  part,  as 
soon  as  we  apply  this  engaging  theory  to  the  work 
of  poets,  we  see  that  certain  aspects  of  it  are 
more  illuminating  in  some  cases  than  others;  in 
other  words,  that  while  the  principle  as  a  whole 
is  true  of  all  poets,  in  some  poets  it  is  one  factor 
which  is  more  important,  and  in  some  another. 
It  is  true,  for  example,  that  Mr.  Fletcher  has  a 
very  original  sensibility,  and  it  is  also  true  that  his 
initial  stimulus  sometimes  comes  from  without, 
but  whereas  in  the  work  of  certain  other  poets  these 
factors  might  be  paramount,  in  the  case  of  Mr. 
Fletcher  the  striking  feature  has  always  been  his 
habit  of  surrendering  himself,  almost  completely, 
to  the  power  of  these  automatically,  unravelling 
verbal  reflexes.  In  fact  the  poetry  of  Mr. 
Fletcher  is  as  remarkable  an  illustration  of  this 
principle  as  one  could  find. 


JOHN    GOULD    FLETCHER 

The  implications  are  rich.  What  occurs  to  one 
immediately  is  that,  as  the  functioning  of  these 
verbal  reflexes  is  most  rapid  when  least  consciously 
controlled,  the  poet  will  be  at  his  best  when  the 
initial  stimulus  is  of  a  nature  to  leave  him  greatest 
freedom.  To  such  a  poet,  it  will  be  seen,  it  would 
be  a  great  handicap,  to  have  to  adhere  too  closely, 
throughout  a  longish  poem,  to  a  fixed  and  unalter- 
able idea.  The  best  theme  for  him  will  be  the 
one  which  is  least  definite,  one  which  will  start 
him  off  at  top  speed  but  will  be  rather  enhanced 
than  impaired  by  the  introduction  and  develop- 
ment of  new  elements,  by  rapid  successive  im- 
provisations in  unforeseen  directions.  Any  sort 
of  conceptual  framework  prepared  in  advance  with 
regard  either  to  subject  or  form  would  be  perpet- 
ually retarding  him,  perpetually  bringing  him  back 
to  a  more  severely  conscious  plane  of  effort,  a  plane 
on  which,  the  chances  are,  he  would  be  far  less 
effective.  These  suppositions  gain  force  when  we 
turn,  in  their  light,  to  Mr.  Fletcher's  work.  In 
"Irradiations"  we  find  him  taking  his  first  ecstatic 
plunge  into  improvisation — formalism  is  thrown 
to  the  winds,  and  with  it  much  which  for  this  poet 
perplexes  and  retards;  and  an  amazingly  rich 
treasure  house  of  verbal  reflexes,  the  gift  of  a 


SCEPTICISMS 

temperament  almost  hyperaesthetic  in  its  sensitive- 
ness to  colour,  line,  and  texture — a  temperament  in 
which  some  profound  disharmony  is  most  easily 
struck  at  and  shaken  through  these  senses — is  for 
the  first  time  rifled.  It  is  in  this  stage  of  a  lyric 
poet's  career  that  his  speech  most  glistens.  Im- 
pressions come  up  shining  from  their  long  burial 
in  the  subconscious.  The  poet  is  perhaps  a  little 
breathless  with  his  sudden  wealth — he  is  at  first 
content  to  bring  up  only  small  handfuls  of  the 
most  glittering  coin;  he  is  even  perhaps  a  little 
distrustful  of  it.  But  the  habit  of  allowing  him- 
self to  be  possessed  by  this  wealth  grows  rapidly. 
The  mechanism  becomes  more  familiar,  if  any- 
thing so  vague  as  this  kind  of  apperception  can  be 
said  to  be  truly  recognizable,  and  the  poet  learns 
the  trick  of  shutting  his  eyes  and  not  merely  allow- 
ing, but  precisely  inviting,  his  subconscious  to  take 
possession  of  him.  The  trick  consists  largely  in  a 
knowledge,  abruptly  acquired,  of  his  own  char- 
acter, and  of  such  ideas  as  are,  therefore,  the 
"Open  Sesame !"  to  this  cave.  It  was  in  colourism 
that  Mr.  Fletcher  found  this  password.  And  it 
was  in  "Goblins  and  Pagodas"  that  he  first  put  it 
to  full  and  gorgeous  use. 

For  in  the  idea  of  a  series  of  symphonies  in 


JOHN    GOULD    FLETCHER 

which  the  sole  unity  was  to  be  a  harmony  of  colour, 
in  which  form  and  emotional  tone  could  follow 
the  lead  of  colouristic  word-associations  no  matter 
how  far  afield,  Mr.  Fletcher  discovered  an  "Open 
Sesame !"  so  ideal  to  his  nature,  and  so  powerful, 
as  not  merely  to  open  the  door,  but  at  one  stroke 
to  lay  bare  his  treasure  entire.  One  should  not 
overlook  here  also  an  important  secondary  element 
in  Mr.  Fletcher's  nature,  a  strong  but  partial 
affinity  for  musical  construction,  a  feeling  for 
powerful  submerged  rhythms  less  ordered  than 
those  of  metrical  verse,  but  more  ordered  than 
those  of  prose;  and  this  element,  too,  found 
its  ideal  opportunity  in  the  colour  symphonies. 
The  result  was,  naturally,  the  most  brilliant  and 
powerful  work  which  Mr.  Fletcher  has  yet  given 
us — a  poetry  unlike  any  other.  It  contains  no 
thought:  Mr.  Fletcher  is  not  a  conceptual  poet. 
It  contains,  in  the  strictly  human  sense,  extraor- 
dinarily little  of  the  sort  of  emotion  which  relates 
to  the  daily  life  of  men  and  women ;  there  are  de- 
spairs and  exaltations  and  sorrows  and  hopes,  and 
the  furious  energy  of  ambition,  and  the  weariness 
of  resignation,  but  they  are  the  emotions  of  some- 
one incorporeal,  and  their  sphere  of  action  is 
among  winds  and  clouds,  the  colours  of  sky  and 


SCEPTICISMS 

sea,  the  glittering  of  rain  and  jewels,  and  not 
among  the  perplexed  hearts  of  humanity.  In  a 
sense  it  is  like  the  symbolism  of  such  poets  as 
Mallarme,  but  with  the  difference  that  here  the 
symbols  have  no  meaning.  It  is  a  sort  of  absolute 
poetry,  a  poetry  of  detached  waver  and  brilliance, 
a  beautiful  flowering  of  language  alone,  a  par- 
thenogenesis, as  if  language  were  fertilized  by 
itself  rather  than  by  thought  or  feeling.  Remove 
the  magic  of  phrase  and  sound,  and  there  is 
nothing  left:  no  thread  of  continuity,  no  relation 
between  one  page  and  the  next,  no  thought,  no 
story,  no  emotion.  But  the  magic  of  phrase  and 
sound  is  powerful,  and  it  takes  one  into  a  fantastic 
world  where  one  is  ethereal ized,  where  one  has 
deep  emotions  indeed,  but  emotions  star-powdered, 
and  blown  to  flame  by  speed  and  intensity  rather 
than  by  thought  or  human  warmth. 

Unfortunately  it  is  only  for  a  little  while  that  a 
poet  can  be  so  completely  possessed  by  the  subcon- 
scious: the  more  complete  the  possession  the  more 
rapid  the  exhaustion.  One  or  two  of  Mr. 
Fletcher's  colour  symphonies  showed  already  a 
flagging  of  energy,  and  in  addition  to  the  uneven- 
ness  which  is  inevitable  in  a  blind  obedience  to  the 
lead  of  word-association  alone  (since  it  leads  as 


JOHN    GOULD    FLETCHER 

often  to  verbosity  as  to  magic)  that  unevenness 
also  is  noticed  which  comes  of  the  poet's  attempt 
to  substitute  the  consciously  for  the  unconsciously 
found — an  attempt  which  for  such  a  temperament 
as  Mr.  Fletcher's  is  frequently  doomed  to  failure. 
There  are  limits,  moreover,  as  we  have  seen,  to 
the  number  of  themes  which  will  draw  out  the 
best  of  the  possessed  type  of  poet.  Failing  to  dis- 
cover new  themes,  he  must  repeat  the  old  ones; 
and  here  it  is  not  long  before  he  feels  his  con- 
sciousness intruding,  and  saying  to  him,  "You 
have  said  this  before,"  a  consciousness  which  at 
once  inhibits  the  unravelling  of  word-association, 
and  brings  him  back  to  that  more  deliberate  sort  of 
art  for  which  he  is  not  so  well  fitted.  It  is  to  this 
point  that  Mr.  Fletcher  has  come,  recently  in  "Jap- 
anese Prints,"  and  now  in  "The  Tree  of  Life." 
Here  and  there  for  a  moment  is  a  flash  of  magic 
and  power — there  are  pages,  even  whole  poems, 
which  are  only  less  delightful  than  the  symphonies 
— but  intermingled  with  how  much  that  is  lame, 
stiltedly  metrical,  verbose,  or  downright  ugly. 
The  use  of  regular  metre  or  rhyme  brings  him 
down  with  a  thud.  .  .  .  "The  Tree  of  Life"  is  a 
volume  of  love  poems,  more  personal  than  Mr. 
Fletcher  has  given  us  hitherto,  and  that  has  an 


SCEPTICISMS 

interest  of  its  own.  But  the  colourism  has  begun 
to  dim,  it  is  often  merely  a  wordy  and  tediously 
overcrowded  imitation  of  the  coloured  swiftness  of 
"Goblins  and  Pagodas,"  the  images  indistinct  and 
conflicting;  and  if  one  is  to  hope  for  further 
brilliance  it  is  not  in  this  but  in  a  new  note,  audible 
here  and  there  in  the  shorter  lyrics,  a  note  of  iron- 
like  resonance,  bitterly  personal,  and  written  in  a 
free  verse  akin  to  the  stark  eloquence  of  Biblical 
prose.  .  .  .  Are  these  lyrics  an  earnest  of  further 
development,  and  will  Mr.  Fletcher  pass  to  that 
other  plane  of  art,  that  of  the  possessor  artist,  the 
artist  who  foresees  and  forges,  who  calculates  his 
effects'?  There  is  hardly  enough  evidence  here  to 
make  one  sure. 


IX 

The  Technique  of  Polyphonic 
Prose:  Amy  Lowell 

MISS  LOWELL  can  always  be  delight- 
fully counted  upon  to  furnish  us  with 
something  of  a  literary  novelty.  She 
has  a  genius  for  vivifying  theory.  No  sooner,  for 
example,  had  she  uttered  the  words  "Free  verse !" 
(which  previously  in  the  mouth  of  Mr.  Pound  had 
left  us  cold)  than  we  closed  about  them  as  a  crowd 
closes  upon  an  accident,  in  a  passion  of  curiosity; 
and  if  ultimately  some  of  us  were  a  little  dis- 
appointed with  the  theory  more  shrewdly  in- 
spected, we  could  be  thankful  at  least  that  it  had 
left  us  Miss  Lowell's  poems.  So  now,  with  the 
publication  of  "Can  Grande's  Castle" — "four  mod- 
ern epics,"  as  the  publishers  term  them — Miss 
Lowell  bids  fair  to  stampede  us  anew  under  the 
banner  of  "polyphonic  prose."  This  is  an  as- 
tonishing book;  never  was  Miss  Lowell's  sheer 


SCEPTICISMS 

energy  of  mind  more  in  evidence.  Viewed  simply 
as  a  piece  of  verbal  craftsmanship  it  is  a  sort  of 
Roget's  Thesaurus  of  colour.  Viewed  as  a  piece  of 
historical  reconstruction  it  is  a  remarkable  feat  of 
documentation,  particularly  the  longest  of  the 
"epics,"  the  story  of  the  bronze  horses  of  San 
Marco.  Viewed  as  poetry,  or  prose,  or  polyphonic 
prose — or  let  us  say,  for  caution's  sake,  as  litera- 
ture— well,  that  is  another  question.  It  is  a 
tribute  to  Miss  Lowell's  fecundity  of  mind  that 
one  must  react  to  her  four  prose-poems  in  so  great 
a  variety  of  ways. 

Miss  Lowell  has  always  been  outspokenly  a 
champion  of  the  theory  that  a  large  part  of  an 
artist's  equipment  is  hard  work,  patient  and  unim- 
passioned  craftsmanship.  This  is  true,  and  Miss 
Lowell's  own  poetry  can  always  be  counted  upon 
to  display,  within  its  known  and  unchangeable 
limitations,  a  verbal,  an  aesthetic,  and  even,  at 
moments,  a  metrical  craftsmanship,  of  a  high  or- 
der. Whether  viewed  technically  or  not,  her 
work  is  always,  and  particularly  to  an  artist,  in- 
triguing and  suggestive:  this  much  one  can  safely 
say  in  advance.  When  we  begin,  however,  to 
assume  toward  her  work  that  attitude  which  con- 
sists in  an  attempt  to  see  the  contemporary  as 


AMY    LOWELL 

later,  through  the  perspective  of  time,  it  will 
appear  to  posterity,  we  change  our  ground  some- 
what. Novelty  must  be  discounted ;  and  exquisite 
tool-work  must  be  seen  not  as  if  through  the  micro- 
scope but  in  its  properly  ancillary  position  as  a 
contributing  element  in  the  artist's  total  success  or 
failure.  This  is  in  effect  to  judge  as  we  can  of 
the  artist's  sensibility  and  mental  character — not 
an  easy  thing  to  do.  The  judge  must  see  over 
the  walls  of  his  own  personality.  Fortunately, 
aesthetic  judgment  is  not  entirely  solipsistic,  but  is 
in  part  guided  by  certain  aesthetic  laws,  vague  but 
none  the  less  usable. 

Miss  Lowell  asserts  in  her  preface  that  poly- 
phonic prose  is  not  an  order  of  prose.  Let  us  not 
quarrel  with  her  on  this  point.  The  important 
questions  are:  first,  its  possible  effectiveness  as  an 
art  form;  and  second,  its  effectiveness  as  employed 
through  the  temperament  of  Miss  Lowell.  She 
says : 

Metrical  verse  has  one  set  of  laws,  cadenced  verse 
another,  polyphonic  prose  can  go  from  one  to  the  other 
in  the  same  poem  with  no  sense  of  incongruity.  Its  only 
touchstone  is  the  taste  and  feeling  of  its  author.  .  .  . 
Yet,  like  all  other  artistic  forms,  it  has  certain  funda- 
mental principles,  and  the  chief  of  these  is  an  insistence 


SCEPTICISMS 

on  the  absolute  adequacy  of  a  passage  to  the  thought  it 
embodies.  Taste  is  therefore  its  determining  factor; 
taste  and  a  rhythmic  ear. 

But  all  this  is  merely  equivalent  to  saying  that  any 
expression  of  the  artist  is  inevitably  self-ex- 
pression, as  if  one  "threw  the  nerves  in  patterns 
on  a  screen."  The  real  touchstone  of  a  work  of 
art  is  not,  ultimately,  the  taste  or  feeling  of  the 
author  (a  singularly  unreliable  judge)  but  the 
degree  to  which  it  "gets  across,"  (as  they  say  of 
the  drama)  to,  let  us  say,  an  intelligent  audience. 
And  here  one  may  properly  question  whether  in 
their  totality  Miss  Lowell's  prose-poems  quite  "get 
across."  They  are  brilliant,  in  the  aesthetic  sense; 
they  are  amazingly  rich  and  frequently  delightful 
in  incident;  they  are  unflaggingly  visualized;  they 
are,  in  a  manner,  triumphs  of  co-ordination.  And 
yet,  they  do  not  quite  come  off.  Why  is  this*? 
Is  it  the  fault  of  Miss  Lowell  or  of  the  form1?  A 
little  of  each;  and  the  reasons  are  many.  Of  the 
more  obvious  sort  is  the  simple  but  deadly  fact 
that  without  exception  these  four  prose-poems  are 
too  long.  Not  too  long  in  an  absolute  sense,  for 
that  would  be  ridiculous,  but  too  long,  first,  in 
relation  to  the  amount  and  nature  of  the  narrative 
element  in  them,  and  second,  in  relation  to  the 

["83 


AMY    LOWELL 

manner,  or  style,  in  which  they  are  written.  Par- 
allels are  not  easy  to  find ;  but  one  can  perhaps  not 
outrageously  adduce  Flaubert's  "Herodias"  and 
"Salammbo"  as  examples  of  success  in  what  is  very 
much  the  same,  not  form,  but  tone  of  art.  Miss 
Lowell,  like  Flaubert,  attempts  a  very  vivid  and 
heavily  laden  reconstruction  of  striking  historical 
events.  No  item  is  too  small  to  be  recreated  for 
its  effect  in  producing  a  living  and  sensuous 
veridity.  But  there  are  two  important  differences. 
In  Flaubert  this  living  sensuousness  is  nearly  al- 
ways subordinated  to  the  narrative,  is  indeed 
merely  the  background  for  it;  whereas  for  Miss 
Lowell  this  sensuous  reconstruction  is  perhaps  the 
main  intention.  And  furthermore,  whereas  Flau- 
bert employed  a  prose  of  which  the  chief  purpose 
was  that  it  should  be  unobtrusively  a  vehicle,  Miss 
Lowell  employs  a  prose  bristlingly  self-conscious, 
of  which  an  important  purpose  is  stylistic  and 
colouristic  brilliance. 

The  defects  that  arise  from  these  two  differences 
are  very  serious.  They  combine  to  rob  Miss 
Lowell  of  the  fruits  to  which  sheer  adroitness  of 
craftsmanship  might  otherwise  have  entitled  her. 
Put  briefly,  these  poems  are  over-descriptive. 
When  one  considers  their  length,  the  narrative 


SCEPTICISMS 

element  is  much  too  slight;  and  not  only  that,  it 
is  too  disjointed.  Narrative  description,  even 
though  able,  is  not  enough.  In  "Sea-Blue  and 
Blood-Red"  Miss  Lowell  introduces  a  really  nar- 
rative theme — narrative,  that  is,  in  the  sense  that  it 
involves  real  dramatis  personae,  in  the  persons  of 
Nelson  and  Lady  Hamilton — and  in  consequence 
the  reader's  interest  is  a  good  deal  better  held.  It 
would  be  still  better  held  however  if  the  pro- 
tagonists had  been  conceived  less  as  gaudily 
sheathed  mannequins,  gesticulating  feverishly  in  a 
whirl  of  coloured  lights  and  confetti,  and  more  as 
human  beings.  It  is  intended  to  show  them  as 
puppets,  of  course,  but  that  effect  would  hardly 
have  been  diminished  by  making  them  psycholog- 
ically more  appealing.  In  "Hedge  Island," 
"Guns  as  Keys,"  and  "Bronze  Horses"  the  unify- 
ing themes  are  still  more  tenuous :  the  supersession 
of  the  stagecoach  by  the  train,  Commodore  Perry's 
voyage  to  Japan,  the  travels  of  the  four  horses  of 
San  Marco.  All  of  them  are  acute  studies  of 
societal  change.  One  feels  in  all  of  them  the  im- 
pressiveness  of  the  conception,  but  in  the  actual 
execution  the  impressiveness  has  partially  escaped. 
One  is,  in  fact,  less  often  impressed  than  fatigued. 
And  this  fatigue,  as  above  intimated,  is  due  not 


AMY    LOWELL 

merely  to  the  lack  of  humanly  interesting  narra- 
tive (as  would  be  added  by  the  introduction  of  a 
character  or  group  of  characters  who  should  enlist 
our  sympathies  throughout)  but  also  to  the  nature 
of  the  style  which  Miss  Lowell  uses.  For  here 
Miss  Lowell,  led  astray  by  love  of  experiment, 
has  made,  in  the  opinion  of  the  present  reviewer, 
a  series  of  fundamental  errors.  The  style  she  has 
chosen  to  use,  whether  regarded  with  a  view  to 
rhythm  or  to  colour-distribution,  is  essentially 
pointillistic.  Now  Miss  Lowell  should  have 
known  that  the  pointillistic  style  is,  in  literature, 
suited  only  to  very  brief  movements.  A  short 
poem  based  on  this  method  may  be  brilliantly  suc- 
cessful; Miss  Lowell  has  herself  proved  it.  A 
long  poem  based  on  this  method,  even  though  sus- 
tainedly  brilliant,  and  perhaps  in  direct  ratio  to  its 
brilliance,  almost  inevitably  becomes  dull.  In  her 
preface  Miss  Lowell  says  that  she  has  taken  for 
the  basis  of  her  rhythm  the  long  cadence  of  ora- 
torical prose.  In  this  however  she  is  mistaken. 
She  has  an  inveterate  and  profoundly  tempera- 
mental and  hence  perhaps  unalterable  addiction  to 
a  short,  ejaculatory,  and  abrupt  style — a  style  in- 
deed of  which  the  most  striking  merits  and  defects 
are  its  vigorous  curtness  and  its  almost  total  lack 

[121] 


SCEPTICISMS 

of  curve  and  grace.  This  is  true  of  her  work 
whether  in  metrical  verse,  free  verse,  or  prose;  it 
is  as  true  of  "The  Cremona  Violin"  as  of  "The 
Bombardment."  This  style,  obviously,  is  ideal 
for  a  moment  of  rapid  action  or  extreme  emotional 
intensity.  But  its  effect  when  used  passim  is  not 
only  fatiguing,  it  is  actually  irritating.  Its  pace 
is  too  often  out  of  all  proportion  to  the  pace  of  the 
action.  One  feels  like  a  horse  who  is  at  the  same 
time  whipped  up  and  reined  in.  The  restlessness 
is  perpetual,  there  is  no  hope  of  relaxation  or  ease, 
one  longs  in  vain  for  a  slowing  down  of  the 
movement,  an  expansion  of  it  into  longer  and 
more  languid  waves.  One  longs,  too,  for  that 
delicious  sublimation  of  tranquillity  and  pause 
which  comes  of  a  beautiful  transition  from  the 
exclamatory  to  the  contemplative,  from  the  rigidly 
angular  to  the  musically  curved. 

This  misapplication  of  style  to  theme  manifests 
itself  as  clearly  on  the  narrowly  aesthetic  plane  as 
on  the  rhythmic.  Here  again  one  sees  a  misuse 
of  pointillism,  for  Miss  Lowell  splashes  too  much 
colour,  uses  colour  and  vivid  image  too  unrestrain- 
edly and  too  much  at  the  same  pitch  of  intensity. 
The  result  is  that  the  rate  of  aesthetic  fatigue  on  the 
reader's  part  is  relatively  rapid.  So  persistent  is 


AMY    LOWELL 

Miss  Lowell's  colouristic  attitude,  so  nearly  un- 
varied is  her  habit  of  presenting  people,  things, 
and  events  in  terms  of  colour  alone,  that  presently 
she  has  reduced  one  to  a  state  of  colour  blindness. 
Image  kills  image,  hue  obliterates  hue,  one  page 
erases  another.  And  when  this  point  has  been 
reached  one  realizes  that  Miss  Lowell's  polyphonic 
prose  has  little  else  to  offer.  Its  sole  raison 
d'etre  is  its  vividness. 

One  wonders,  indeed,  whether  Miss  Lowell  has 
not  overestimated  the  possibilities  of  this  form. 
It  is  precisely  at  those  points  where  polyphonic 
prose  is  more  self-conscious  or  artificial  than  or- 
dinary prose — where  it  introduces  an  excess  of 
rhyme,  assonance,  and  alliteration — that  it  is 
most  markedly  inferior  to  it.  Theory  to  the  con- 
trary, these  shifts  from  prose  to  winged  prose  or 
verse  are  often  so  abrupt  as  to  be  incongruous  and 
disturbing.  But  disturbance  as  an  element  in 
aesthetic  attack  should  be  subordinate,  not  domi- 
nant— the  exception,  not  the  rule.  Miss  Lowell's 
polyphonic  prose  is  a  perpetual  furor  of  disturb- 
ance, both  of  thought  and  of  style.  Again,  re- 
frain should  be  sparely  used,  adroitly  varied  and 
concealed;  and  the  counterpoint  of  thought,  if  it 
is  not  to  become  monotonous,  must  be  a  good  deal 

D23] 


SCEPTICISMS 

subtler  than  it  is,  for  instance,  in  "Bronze  Horses." 
All  these  artifices  are  used  to  excess,  and  the  up- 
shot is  a  style  of  which  the  most  salient  character- 
istic is  exuberance  without  charm.  "Taste"  and 
"rhythmic  ear"  too  frequently  fail.  And  one  is 
merely  amused  when  one  encounters  a  passage  like 
the  following: 

Such  a  pounding,  pummelling,  pitching,  pointing,  pierc- 
ing, pushing,  pelting,  poking,  panting,  punching,  parry- 
ing, pulling,  prodding,  puking,  piling,  passing,  you  never 
did  see. 

It  is  hard  to  regard  this  as  anything  but  tyronism. 
These  are  the  main  features  of  the  artistic  in- 
completeness of  "Can  Grande's  Castle."  One 
could  analyse  it  further,  of  course — one  thinks,  for 
example,  of  Miss  Lowell's  habit,  when  tempted  to 
use  a  simile,  of  comparing  the  larger  thing  to  the 
smaller,  as  the  sea  or  the  sky  to  a  flower;  the  effect 
of  which  is  not  at  all  what  is  intended,  and  very 
unpleasant.  A  simile  may  be  successful  in  point 
of  colour,  and  yet  fail  because  of  its  ineptitude  on 
another  plane,  as  by  suggesting  rigidity  when 
liquidity  is  desired,  or  minuteness  when  it  is 
desired  to  suggest  spaciousness.  But  this  is  ele- 
mentary, a  minor  point,  and  it  is  time  to  return 


AMY    LOWELL 

to  our  starting  place,  and  to  reiterate  what  has 
perhaps  in  this  prolonged  analysis  been  lost  sight 
of;  namely,  that  even  what  is  relatively  a  failure 
for  Miss  Lowell  is  none  the  less  brilliant,  and 
would  suffice  to  make  the  reputation  of  a  lesser 
poet.  "Can  Grande's  Castle"  is  a  remarkable 
book,  a  book  which  every  one  interested  in  the  di- 
rection of  contemporary  poetry  should  read, 
whether  for  its  own  sake  or  for  its  value  as  the 
test  of  a  new  form  of  art. 


X 

Poetry  as  Supernaturalism: 
William  Stanley  Braithwaite 

THE  energy  of  Mr.  Braithwaite  is  unflag- 
ging. Not  content  with  bringing  out 
annually  the  "Anthology  of  Magazine 
Verse,"  he  has  lately  entered  upon  another  and 
even  huger  enterprise — "A  Critical  Anthology,"  he 
calls  it;  and  this,  too,  threatens  to  become  a  hardy 
perennial.  In  these  four  hundred  pages,  which 
for  the  greater  part  consist  of  his  reviews  in  the 
Boston  Evening  Transcript,  slightly  revised  and 
cast  into  the  form  of  al  fresco  conversations 
between  Mr.  Braithwaite  and  three  others,  Mr. 
Braithwaite  purports  to  cover  the  entire  field  of 
English  and  American  poetry  for  1916.  Some 
fifty  odd  poets  are  discussed  here,  a  list  long 
enough  surely  to  have  included  certain  poets  whose 
omission  seems  singular  enough  to  warrant  a  more 
specific  explanation  than  Mr.  Braithwaite  offers. 
[126] 


WILLIAM    BRAITHWAITE 

Mr.  Robert  Frost  and  Mr.  Wilfrid  Wilson  Gibson 
come  in  for  only  incidental  mention.  Messrs. 
Wallace  Stevens,  T.  S.  Eliot,  and  Maxwell 
Bodenheim  (whose  work  has  appeared  in  anthol- 
ogies) are  not  mentioned  at  all.  With  these  ex- 
ceptions, however,  the  list  is  complete  enough  to 
afford  us  a  clear  idea  of  Mr.  Braithwaite's  temper 
and  method. 

Concerning  his  predilections,  Mr.  Braithwaite 
leaves  us  in  no  doubt  whatever.  At  the  very  centre 
of  his  attitude  toward  poetry  is  the  express  belief 
that  poetry  is  a  sort  of  supernaturalism.  "It  is 
the  sacerdotal  wonder  of  life  which  poets  feel," 
he  remarks.  "More  certainly  than  other  men, 
poets  are  conscious  of  pre-existence,  in  other 
worlds,  and  in  this  too."  Elsewhere,  one  en- 
counters also  such  expressions  as  "reverence  for 
life,"  "quest  for  beauty,"  and  "mystic  illumina- 
tion." This  sort  of  thing,  one  must  confess,  is  a 
little  too  easy.  Is  it  not  really  a  shrugging  of  the 
critic's  burden  from  his  own  shoulders, — onto  the 
shoulders  of  God?  This  is  no  place,  to  be  sure, 
for  a  quarrel  over  the  importance  or  the  reality  of 
God ;  but  it  is  perhaps  not  going  too  far  to  say  that 
within  the  sphere  of  man's  consciousness,  no  mat- 
ter to  what  miraculous  origin  it  be  ascribed,  all 


SCEPTICISMS 

things  are  at  least  subject  to  man's  observation 
and  analysis.  If  in  the  presence  of  a  piece  of 
poetry  the  critic  is  content  merely  with  the  ex- 
clamatory, he  is  not  doing  his  work.  Let  him 
remember  that  he  is  dealing,  at  least  in  large 
measure,  not  with  the  supernatural  but  with  the 
natural;  and  what  is  natural  has  natural 
(biological  and  psychological)  causes.  These  it 
is  the  critic's  duty  to  determine  and  to  relate. 

It  is  easy  to  see,  therefore,  where,  in  his  relation 
to  contemporary  poetry,  so  fundamental  a  failure 
leads  Mr.  Braithwaite.  With  this  somewhat 
quaint  notion  of  the  holiness  of  poetry  in  his 
head  it  is  natural  that  he  should  be  most  tolerant 
toward  that  sort  of  poetry  which  itself,  in  some- 
what the  same  manner,  takes  for  granted  the 
not-to-be-questioned  holiness  of  life.  In  his 
present  book,  therefore,  Mr.  Braithwaite  puts 
a  clear  emotional  emphasis  on  work  which  is 
characteristically  sentimental.  Lizette  Wood- 
worth  Reese,  Bliss  Carman,  Amelia  Josephine 
Burr,  Olive  Til  ford  Dargan,  Louis  V.  Ledoux, 
Hermann  Hagedorn, — these  are  some  of  the 
poets  about  whom  Mr.  Braithwaite  can  talk 
with  unrestrained  enthusiasm.  They,  and  to  a 
less  extent  Edwin  Arlington  Robinson,  observe 


WILLIAM    BRAITHWAITE 

toward  life,  in  varying  degrees,  an  attitude  of 
chaste,  romantic  awe;  and  it  is  this  attitude,  par- 
ticularly when  it  approaches  the  sweetly  ecstatic 
or  appears  to  be  barely  concealing  a  sob,  that  most 
delights  Mr.  Braithwaite.  Consequently,  such 
other  poets  as  Edgar  Lee  Masters,  Orrick  Johns, 
William  Carlos  Williams,  and  the  unmentioned 
Carl  Sandburg,  T.  S.  Eliot,  Wallace  Stevens, 
John  Rodker,  and  other  poets  of  the  "Others" 
group,  who  are  in  the  main  realists,  implicitly  criti- 
cal or  analytical  of  life,  or  at  the  most  neutrally 
receptive,  are  somewhat  coolly  entertained.  Of 
Mr.  Masters  Mr.  Braithwaite  remarks,  character- 
istically, that  he  "de-affinitizes  imagination  of 
mystery";  of  the  poets  who  contributed  to 
"Others,"  that  they  do  not  deal  with  life  "but 
with  their  own  little  conception  of  it," — which,  of 
course,  is  precisely  what  all  poets  do.  To  Bliss 
Carman,  on  the  other  hand,  he  ascribes  "magic," 
"natural  symbolisms  with  .  .  .  supernatural 
meanings.  .  .  ."  Clearly,  such  an  attitude  reveals 
in  Mr.  Braithwaite  a  very  decided  intellectual 
limitation.  Must  poetry  be  all  marshmallows  and 
tears?  Is  it  to  be  prohibited  from  dealing  with 
ideas,  or  restricted  solely  to  a  contemplation  of 
that  small  part  of  our  lives  which  is,  in  a  senti- 


SCEPTICISMS 

mental  sense,  beautiful?  Is  poetry  to  be  merely 
a  perfume  reserved  for  our  moments  of  languor"? 
Mr.  Braithwaite  might  not  say  "yes"  to  this  ques- 
tion as  it  stands,  but  if  it  were  put  in  a  slightly 
different  form,  he  would.  And  in  consequence, 
try  as  he  will,  he  cannot  be  entirely  fair  to  our 
contemporary  empiricists.  Even  in  his  discussion 
of  such  poets  as  John  Gould  Fletcher  and  Miss 
Lowell,  amiable  and  even  adulatory  as  (oddly 
enough)  it  sometimes  is,  one  detects  a  fundamental 
perplexity  and  lack  of  understanding. 

The  trouble  with  this  book  is,  then,  at  bottom, 
that  while  it  has  a  rather  intriguing  appearance 
of  being  judicial,  it  is  really,  under  the  mask, 
highly  idiosyncratic.  This  might  be  redeemed  if 
Mr.  Braithwaite,  in  any  part  of  his  work,  showed 
himself  to  be  an  interpreter  possessed  of  subtlety 
or  persuasiveness.  Unfortunately  that  cannot  be 
said.  Mr.  Braithwaite  has,  to  begin  with,  a 
singular  incapacity  for  perceiving  the  real  mean- 
ings of  words.  He  uses  words  in  an  orotund, 
meaningless  way;  words  like  "essence,"  "sub- 
stance," "mystery,"  "symbolism,"  are  for  ever  on 
his  tongue.  For  this  reason  a  great  part  of  his 
book  is  thin  reading;  it  is  often  impossible,  except 


WILLIAM    BRAITHWAITE 

through  the  exercise  of  considerable  imagination, 
to  get  any  meaning  out  of  it  whatever.  It  is 
possible  indeed  that  his  inability  to  associate  words 
precisely  with  the  ideas  for  which  they  stand  is 
the  central  secret  of  Mr.  Braithwaite's  failure  as  a 
critic :  the  cloudy  inaccuracy  of  style  may  well  be 
simply  another  aspect  of  an  attitude  of  mind  which 
has  determined  his  predilection  for  vaguely  inter- 
pretative rather  than  judicial  criticism.  It  may 
equally  account  for  the  extraordinary  lack  of  dis- 
crimination which  leads  him  to  discuss,  not  so 
many  kinds  of  art  (which  would  be  merely 
catholic),  but  so  many  qualities  of  art,  as  if 
on  one  level  of  excellence.  Brilliant,  good, 
mediocre,  and  downright  bad ;  subtle  and  common- 
place; cerebral  and  sentimental, — all  are  treated 
as  of  equal  importance,  and,  apparently  (as  indi- 
cated by  the  last  pair  of  contrasted  terms),  with- 
out any  keen  awareness  of  their  differences.  When 
he  is  beyond  his  depth,  Mr.  Braithwaite  simply 
takes  refuge  in  words.  "Every  sense  is  evocative 
and  intuitional,"  he  says.  "Mysticism  and  won- 
der are  the  vital  nerves  which  connect  the  outer 
world  of  reality  with  the  inner  world  of  spirit. 
Does  it  matter  how  the  substance  is  shaped,  so 


SCEPTICISMS 

long  as  it  is  given  a  being?"  This  is  mere  word- 
blowing;  and  Mr.  Braithwaite's  book  is  full  of 
syllogisms  equally  ghostly. 

Shall  we  never  learn  that  there  is  nothing  mys- 
terious or  supernatural  about  poetry;  that  it  is  a 
natural,  organic  product,  with  discoverable  func- 
tions, clearly  open  to  analysis?  It  would  be  a 
pity  if  our  critics  and  poets  were  to  leave  this 
to  the  scientists  instead  of  doing  it  themselves. 


XI 

.    Romantic  Traditionalism: 
Alan  Seeger 

IF  Freud's  theory  of  the  artist  is  correct — that 
the  artist  is  one  in  whom  the  pleasure  prin- 
ciple of  childhood  never  gives  way  to  the 
reality  principle  of  maturity — then  we  have  a 
particularly  typical  artist,  in  this  sense,  in  Alan 
Seeger.  Alan  Seeger  was  one  of  that  large  class 
who  never  see  the  world  as  it  is,  who  always  see 
it  as  they  wish  it  to  be.  To  a  considerable  extent 
that  is  true  of  all  of  us.  We  all  remain  children 
at  least  in  part.  The  difference  between  the  nor- 
mal human  being  (if  there  is  any)  and  the  artist 
is  merely  quantitative;  the  artist,  in  addition  to 
his  power  of  speech,  keeps  more  of  the  child's  in- 
stinct for  living  in  the  imagination,  for  avoiding 
contact  with  the  somewhat  harsh — or,  at  any  rate, 
indifferent — world  of  reality.  There  is,  of  course, 
another  type  of  artist — the  type  to  which  Shake- 

D333 


SCEPTICISMS 

speare,  Euripides,  Balzac,  Turgenev  and  Mere- 
dith belong — which  develops  the  pleasure  prin- 
ciple and  reality  principle  side  by  side,  achieving 
the  perfect  balance  which  we  call  greatness. 
That  type  is  rare  and  for  the  present  does  not 
concern  us. 

Alan  Seeger  belongs  conspicuously  to  the 
former  class.  He  was  sensitive,  retiring,  idiosyn- 
cratic, lived  very  much  if  not  exclusively  in  books 
during  his  youth,  and  developed  the  art  of  self- 
delusion  to  an  extraordinary  pitch.  He  cut  him- 
self off  almost  entirely  from  the  real  world  of 
real  (and,  from  his  viewpoint,  somewhat  uninter- 
esting) men  and  women,  and  equally  so  from  any 
intellectual  contact  with  it.  An  aesthetic  attitude 
was  all  he  believed  in  assuming  toward  the  world 
which  he  was  capable  of  perceiving,  and  in  conse- 
quence he  devoted  his  energies  to  the  perfecting  of 
himself  as  a  sensorium.  Thought,  no  doubt, 
seemed  to  him  a  thing  essentially  painful  and  to 
be  avoided.  The  result  of  this  characteristic  in 
his  poetry  is  precisely  what  we  should  expect.  It 
is  somewhat  archaically  romantic;  mellifluous,  al- 
ways, in  the  effort  to  be  sensuously  decorative;  a 
little  self-consciously  poetic.  It  is  the  kind  of 
poetry  which  begins  by  omitting  all  words  which 


ALAN    SEEGER 

seem  to  belong  to  prose ;  it  divides  speech  into  two 
classes,  poetic  and  prosaic,  and  selects  for  its 
artificial  purpose  only  the  lovely  (when  taste  is  at 
its  best)  or  the  merely  sensuous  or  pretty  (when 
taste  subsides  a  little).  One  gets,  therefore,  in 
reading  Seeger's  poems  a  mild  and  never  intense 
pleasure.  Vague  sights  and  sounds,  vague  because 
somewhat  cloudily  seen  and  heard  by  the  poet, 
flow  past  in  pleasant  rhythms.  Nothing  disturbs. 
All  is  as  liquid  and  persuasive  as  drifting  in  a 
gondola.  There  are  no  ideas  to  take  hold  of,  no 
emotions  so  intense  as  to  shake  one's  repose.  One 
has  a  drowsy  impression  of  trees,  flowers,  ponds, 
clouds,  blue  sky,  old  walls,  lutes;  and  youth  in  the 
foreground  engaged  in  a  faintly  melancholy 
anguish  of  love.  The  tone  of  these  poems, 
whether  in  the  fragmentary  and  static  narratives, 
or  in  the  measured  sonnets,  seldom  varies. 

In  short,  Alan  Seeger  was  a  belated  romantic 
poet — and  a  romantic  poet  without  any  peculiar 
originality.  He  had  a  keen  ear,  a  flexible 
technique — but  nothing  new  to  say,  and  no  new 
way  of  saying  what  had  been  said  before.  His 
verse,  throughout,  is  a  verse  of  close  approxima- 
tions; it  is  always  mother-of-pearl,  but  seldom 
pearl. 

D353 


XII 

A  Pointless  Pointillist:  Ezra 
Pound 

IF  one  might  conceive,  in  the  heliotrope  future, 
any  Ph.  Demon  so  inspired  as  to  set  about 
compiling  a  list  of  dull  books  by  interesting 
authors,  one  could  hardly  doubt  that  Ezra 
Pound's  "Pavannes  and  Divisions"  would  be  his 
first  entry.  An  incredible  performance!  Some- 
how, one  has  had  all  these  years  (for  alas,  Mr. 
Pound's  indiscretions  can  no  longer  be  called  the 
indiscretions  of  youth)  the  impression  that  this 
King-Maker  among  poets  was  quite  the  most 
mercurial  of  our  performers.  One  associated  with 
his  name  the  deftest  of  jugglery,  sleights  of  mind 
without  number,  lightning-like  tergiversatility, 
and  a  genius  for  finding  the  latest  procession  and 
leading  it  attired  in  the  most  dazzling  of  colours. 
Of  course,  Mr.  Pound  has  himself  been  at  some 
pains  to  encourage  us  in  this  view.  As  a  publicist 

[1363 


EZRA    POUND 

he  has  few  equals.  But  surely  it  has  not  been 
entirely  a  deception!  .  .  .  And  nevertheless  he 
comes  now  upon  us  with  "Pavannes  and  Divi- 
sions"— "a  collection,"  says  Mr.  Knopf,  "of  the 
best  prose  written  by  Mr.  Pound  during  the  last  six 
years" — and  therewith  threatens,  if  we  are  not 
careful,  to  destroy  our  illusions  about  him  for  ever. 

For,  regrettable  as  is  the  confession,  the  out- 
standing feature  of  this  book  of  prose  is  its 
dulness.  One  reads  more  and  more  slowly,  en- 
countering always  heavier  obstacles,  and — short 
of  a  major  effort  of  the  will  (and  a  kind  of  amazed 
curiosity) — one  finally  stops.  Intrinsically  there- 
fore one  may  say  at  once  that  the  book  is  without 
value.  If  one  is  to  examine  it  carefully,  one  does 
so  for  quite  another  reason;  namely,  because  Mr. 
Pound  is  himself  an  interesting  figure — (observe 
his  portrait  in  this  volume,  so  elaborately  and 
theatrically  posed) — a  curious  representative  of 
homo  sapiens,  and  without  any  doubt  a  poet  who 
has  (sometimes  severely)  influenced  his  fellow 
poets.  "Pavannes  and  Divisions"  shall  be  to  us 
therefore  what  the  soliloquies  of  the  patient  are  to 
the  psychoanalyst. 

If  we  pass  over  the  unoriginal  parts  of  this  book 
— the  clever  translation  of  Laforgue,  and  the  well- 


SCEPTICISMS 

selected  dialogues  of  Fontanelle,  amusing  but  nu- 
gatory— and  if  we  listen  with  concentrated  atten- 
tion to  the  Mr.  Pound  who  chatters  to  us,  alter- 
nately, in  the  lumberingly  metrical  and  crudely 
satirical  doggerel  of  "L'Homme  Moyen  Sensuel," 
or  the  disjointed  and  aimless  prose  of  the  essays 
and  fables,  what  emerges  from  this  babble*?  A 
portrait,  sharp-featured  as  Mr.  Pound's  frontis- 
piece, but  how  infinitely  more  complex — a  portrait 
which  surely  not  even  a  Vorticist  could  compass. 
One  is  reminded,  indeed,  of  Mr.  Sludge,  so  inex- 
tricably the  most  sterling  platitudes  and  the  most 
brazen  quackeries  (no  doubt  believed  in)  are  here 
commingled.  Add  to  this  that  Mr.  Pound,  like  a 
jack-in-the-box,  takes  a  nai've  delight  in  booing  at 
the  stately;  that  he  has  the  acquisitive  instincts  of 
the  jackdaw  (with  a  passion  for  bright  and  shin- 
ing objects,  particularly  those  spied  from  a  very 
great  distance) ;  that  he  is  unhappy  unless  he  can 
be  rebelling  at  something  or  somebody  (even  at 
himself  of  the  day  before  yesterday — and  this  is 
healthy)  ;  and  finally  that  as  a  poet  he  has  genius, 
and  has  given  us  more  than  a  handful  of  beautiful 
lyrics — and  one  begins  to  perceive  that  Mr. 
Pound's  middle  name  should  have  been  not 
Loomis  but  Proteus.  Those  to  whom  Mr.  Pound 

[1383 


EZRA    POUND 

is  a  thorn  in  the  flesh  will  say  that  it  is  amazing 
that  the  poet  of  "Cathay"  should,  in  "Pavannes 
and  Divisions,"  reveal  himself  so  hopelessly  as  of 
third-rate  mentality :  those  who  are  charitable  will 
say  that  if  a  poet  is  to  live  he  must  also  be  a  jour- 
nalist. There  is  no  chance  for  an  argument,  since 
one  cannot  possibly  tell  how  seriously  "Pavannes 
and  Divisions"  is  intended.  But  if  one  cannot 
read  Mr.  Pound's  intentions,  his  accomplishment 
is  obvious  and  disillusioning.  If  a  poet  must  be  a 
journalist,  let  him  be  a  good  one !  And  this  Mr. 
Pound  is  not. 

For  in  point  of  style,  or  manner,  or  whatever,  it 
is  difficult  to  imagine  anything  much  worse  than 
the  prose  of  Mr.  Pound.  It  is  ugliness  and  awk- 
wardness incarnate.  Did  he  always  write  so 
badly?  One  recollects  better  moments  in  his  his- 
tory and  one  even  now  finds  him,  as  in  the  first 
paragraph  of  his  paper  on  Dolmetsch,  making  a 
music  of  prose.  For  the  secret  of  this  decay  one 
must  turn,  as  in  all  such  cases,  to  the  nature  of 
the  man's  mind,  since  style  is  not  a  mere  applica- 
tion or  varnish  but  the  unconscious  expression  of 
a  nature.  And  here  is  encountered  one  of  Mr. 
Pound's  chief  characteristics,  one  that  has  from 
the  very  beginning  been  steadily  growing  upon 


SCEPTICISMS 

him  and — it  might  be  added — steadily  strangling 
his  creative  instinct.  This  characteristic  is  his 
passion  for  the  decisive.  His  strokes  are  all  of 
an  equal  weight  and  finality.  On  the  sensory 
plane  this  first  manifested  itself,  no  doubt,  as  a 
desire  for  the  single  and  brilliant  image.  In  logic 
or  dialectics  it  became  a  passion  for  the  point,  glit- 
tering and  deadly.  In  the  field  of  aesthetics  it  has 
revealed  itself  as  a  need  for  espousing  the  out-of- 
the-way  and  remote  and  exceptional,  so  as  to  add  a 
sort  of  impact  and  emphasis  to  personality  by  a 
solitariness  of  opinion :  it  is  more  striking  to  play  a 
tune  on  the  Chinese  p'i-pa  than  on  the  banjo.  On 
these  several  planes  this  instinctive  appetite  has 
become  more  and  more  voracious,  more  and  more 
exclusive,  until  finally  it  has  reached  a  point  where 
it  threatens  to  leave  Mr.  Pound  little  else.  His 
poetry  has  become  imageless  through  excess  of  im- 
age— image  too  deliberately  sought.  His  prose 
has  become  pointless  and  merely  fatiguing  be- 
cause of  his  effort  to  point  every  sentence :  it  has 
become  a  sort  of  chevaux  de  frise,  impossible  to 
walk  through.  These  are  failures  which,  one 
would  think,  the  artist  in  Mr.  Pound  would  have 
foreseen.  In  prose  it  is  a  failure  made  all  the 
more  complete  by  the  fact  that  the  pointillist  style 


EZRA    POUND 

was  the  last  style  for  which  he  was  intellectually 
fitted.  Without  the  patience  for  careful  analysis, 
or  the  acumen  and  precision  and  breadth  for  sci- 
entific investigation,  this  method  makes  of  him 
merely  a  subjectivist  pedant,  a  tinkling  sciolist, 
and — what  is  more  amazing  for  the  man  who 
wrote  "Cathay" — an  apostle  of  the  jejune  and 
sterile.  For  so  intent  has  Mr.  Pound  become  on 
this  making  of  points  and  cutting  of  images  that  he 
has  gradually  crystallized  from  them  a  cold  and 
hard  doctrine,  a  doctrine  of  negative  virtues,  aimed 
primarily  against  aesthetic  excess,  but  in  the  upshot 
totally  inimical  to  that  spontaneity  and  opulence 
without  which  art  is  still-born.  In  short,  Mr. 
Pound  has  become,  as  regards  style,  a  purist  of 
the  most  deadly  sort.  So  absorbed  has  he  become 
in  the  minutiae  of  aesthetics,  so  fetichistic  in  his 
adoration  of  literary  nugae,  that  he  has  gradually 
come  to  think  of  style  and  filigree  as  if  the  terms 
were  synonymous.  This  is  the  more  lamentable 
because  his  aesthetics,  as  revealed  in  his  prose,  are 
by  no  means  subtle.  One  cannot  rear  a  palace  of 
filigree:  nor  can  one  compose  a  Hamlet  or  a  Tyl 
Eulenspiegel  entirely  of  velleities  and  evanescent 
nuances.  Young  authors,  let  us  grant  with  Mr. 
Pound,  must  learn  to  be  artisans  before  they  can 


SCEPTICISMS 

complete  themselves  as  artists.  But  at  the  point 
where  purism  stifles  exuberance  and  richness  (the 
intense  confession  of  the  sub-conscious)  and  at  the 
point  where,  as  an  aesthetic  measure,  it  prefers  the 
neatly  made  to  the  well-felt  or  the  profoundly 
thought,  it  becomes  obviously  vicious. 

It  is  the  critic's  license  ta  over-refine  his  point 
for  the  sake  of  emphasis,  and  this  perhaps,  in  the 
present  case,  we  have  clearly  done.  To  restore  the 
balance  somewhat  we  should  add  that,  though  by 
no  means  profound,  Mr.  Pound  is  provocative  and 
suggestive  in  his  essays  on  the  troubadours  and  the 
Elizabethan  translators,  and  refreshing  in  his  pa- 
pers on  Dolmetsch  and  Remy  de  Gourmont. 
After  all,  is  he  perhaps,  in  his  prose,  deliberately 
a  journalist^  .  .  .  And  we  remember  with  grati- 
tude that  he  is  a  poet. 


XIII 

Poetic  Realism:  Carl  Sandburg 

IT  is  one  of  the  anomalies  of  the  present  poetic 
revival  in  this  country  that  it  is  not  domi- 
nated by  any  one  single  group  or  tendency, 
but  shared  in  and  fought  for  by  many :  classicists, 
romanticists,  and  realists,  of  varying  degrees  of 
radicalism,  all  exist  simultaneously,  so  that  we 
have  a  spectacle  to  which  perhaps  no  era  was  ever 
before  treated, — a  complete  cycle  of  poetic  evolu- 
tion presented  not  in  the  usual  span  of  two  cen- 
turies, more  or  less,  but  in  the  space  of  two  years. 
Those  who  are  interested  in  poetry  are  today  per- 
mitted to  watch  a  three-ringed  circus,  and  to  dis- 
tribute their  applause  as  they  please;  with  a  fair 
certainty  that  they  will  find  something  worth  ap- 
plauding. The  rivalry  is  keen.  Nobody  will 
hazard  a  guess  as  to  which  ring  will  dominate  the 
circus.  But  so  long  as  the  competitors  are  goaded 
on  by  the  feats  of  their  rivals  to  new  and  more 
astonishing  acrobatics,  it  does  not  so  much  matter. 


SCEPTICISMS 

More  akin  to  Mr.  Masters,  perhaps,  than  to 
Mr.  Frost,  Carl  Sandburg  nevertheless  has  char- 
acter of  his  own, — whatever  we  think  of  his  work 
we  cannot  deny  that  it  is  individual,  that  it  has 
the  raciness  of  originality.  The  cumulative  effect 
is  one  of  vigour,  a  certain  harshness  bordering  on 
the  sadistic,  a  pleasant  quality  of  sensuousness  in 
unexpected  places,  ethical  irony, — and  sentimen- 
tality. Mr.  Sandburg  is  a  socialist,  and  consist- 
ently preaches  socialist  morals.  Next  to  his  de- 
ficiencies as  regards  form,  it  is  perhaps  Mr.  Sand- 
burg's greatest  fault  that  he  allows  the  poet  to  be 
out-talked  by  the  sociologist.  If  Tennyson  is  now 
regarded  as  a  tiresome  moral  sentimentalist,  who 
knows  whether  a  future  generation,  to  whom  many 
of  Mr.  Sandburg's  dreams  may  have  become  reali- 
ties, will  not  so  regard  Mr.  Sandburg1?  That  is 
the  danger,  always,  of  being  doctrinaire.  Doc- 
trine is  interesting  only  when  new. 

Mr.  Sandburg  restricts  himself  almost  entirely 
to  free  verse:  among  free  verse  writers  he  is  the 
realist,  as  the  Imagists  are  the  romanticists.  But 
the  free  verse  of  the  Imagists  is  a  highly  complex 
and  formal  vehicle  by  comparison  with  Mr.  Sand- 
burg's free  verse:  it  is  comparatively  seldom  that 
Mr.  Sandburg  betrays  anything  more  than  a  rather 

D44] 


CARL    SANDBURG 

rudimentary  sense  of  balance  or  echo.  For  the 
most  part,  he  employs  a  colloquial,  colourful  jour- 
nalese prose,  arranged  either  in  successsions  of 
sharply  periodic  sentences,  each  sentence  compos- 
ing one  verse-line,  or  in  very  long  and  often 
clumsy  sentences  formed  of  successive  suspended 
clauses,  a  suspense  which  he  ultimately  relieves 
by  a  return  to  the  periodic.  In  other  words,  Mr. 
Sandburg  is  so  intent  on  saying,  without  hindrance 
whatsoever,  precisely  what  he  has  it  in  his  mind 
to  say,  that  he  will  not  submit  to  the  restraints  of 
any  intricate  verse-form,  even  of  his  own  inven- 
tion, but  spreads  out  in  a  sort  of  gnomic  prose. 
There  are  exceptions,  of  course :  in  such  poems  as 
"Sketch,"  "Lost,"  "Fog,"  "White  Shoulders," 
"Graves,"  "Monotone,"  "Follies,"  "Nocturne  in 
a  Deserted  Brickyard,"  "Poppies," — and  there  are 
others,  too, — there  is  movement,  balance,  some- 
times a  return  by  repetition,  sometimes  a  return  by 
echo.  But  even  in  these  the  movement,  balance 
and  return  are  often  those  of  a  rhetorical  and  oro- 
tund prose  rather  than  of  verse.  The  rhythm  is 
slurred,  unaccented,  in  fact  a  prose  rhythm,  with 
interspersions  of  single  lines  or  groups  of  lines 
which  rise  to  a  simple  cantabile  sometimes  a  little 
astonishing  in  the  context.  These  are  Mr.  Sand- 

D45] 


SCEPTICISMS 

burg's  lyric  moments — the  moments  when  the  sen- 
timental Sandburg  masters  the  ethical  or  ironic 
Sandburg.  Some  of  the  poems  listed  above,  and 
others,  such  as  "Pals,"  "Gone"  (which  has  a  de- 
lightful balance),  "Used  Up,"  "Margaret,"  are  al- 
most completely  rhythmic,  rhythmic  in  a  simple 
and  unsubtle  sense,  with  a  regular  and  easily  fol- 
lowed ictus.  These  are  short  flights,  they  suggest, 
—as  indeed  all  of  Mr.  Sandburg's  work  suggests, 
— the  penguin  aeroplanes  in  which  novice  aviators 
are  trained:  at  the  maximum  speed  the  penguin 
barely  manages  to  lift  from  the  ground,  and  to 
achieve  a  sort  of  skipping  glide. 

Now,  if  these  observations  on  Mr.  Sandburg's 
technique  are  in  any  measure  accurate,  it  becomes 
important  to  know  whether  for  his  sacrifice  of 
form  Mr.  Sandburg  receives  sufficient  compensa- 
tion from  the  increased  freedom  of  speech  thus  ob- 
tained. Has  Mr.  Sandburg  by  sacrifice  of  those 
qualities  of  verse  which  appeal  to  the  ear,  and  in 
some  measure  to  the  eye,  been  enabled  to  say  any- 
thing which  could  not  have  been  said  more  beau- 
tifully, or  more  forcefully,  by  a  keener  use  of  sym- 
metry*? For  the  present  critic  the  answer  must, 
on  the  whole,  be  negative.  In  a  general  sense, 
Mr.  Sandburg's  material  is  the  material  of  Frost, 

[1463 


CARL    SANDBURG 

Masters,  Gibson,  Masefield :  the  dominant  charac- 
teristic of  all  five  men  is  the  search  for  colour  and 
pathos  in  the  lives  of  the  commonplace.  Mr. 
Sandburg  is  less  selective,  that  is  all, — he  spills  in 
the  chaff  with  the  wheat.  With  much  that  is 
clear,  hard,  colourful,  suggestive,  there  is  much 
also  that  is  muddy,  extraneous,  and  dull.  The 
other  members  of  the  realist  school  use  the  same 
material,  but,  being  defter  artists,  use  it  better. 
What  Mr.  Sandburg  adds  is  the  sociological  ele- 
ment, which  is  the  least  valuable  part  of  his  book. 
Ethics  and  art  cannot  be  married. 

In  this,  I  think,  we  get  at  the  whole  secret  of 
Mr.  Sandburg's  weakness :  he  does  not  completely 
synthesize,  or  crystallize  his  poems.  He  always 
gives  too  much,  goes  too  far.  His  poetic  concep- 
tion is  not  sufficiently  sharp,  and  in  consequence 
his  speech  cannot  always  be  sufficiently  symmetri- 
cal or  intense  to  be  called  poetic  speech.  Clear 
thought  brings  clear  expression,  and  the  converse 
also  is  true,  as  Croce  says.  Something  of  the  sort 
is  true  of  the  writing  of  poetry.  The  clearer,  the 
more  intense  the  emotion  or  idea,  the  more  direct, 
forceful,  beautiful,  and  rhythmic  will  be  the  ex- 
pression of  it.  By  a  graded  scale  one  passes  from 
the  more  to  the  less  intense,  and  that  is  the  pas- 

D47] 


SCEPTICISMS 

sage  from  poetry  to  prose.  Examine  carefully 
even  the  more  rhythmic  of  Mr.  Sandburg's  poems, 
and  you  will  almost  invariably  find,  even  in  poems 
of  four  lines  or  less,  that  the  poem  can  be  im- 
proved by  the  omission  of  one  or  more  lines,  one  or 
more  ideas,  which  only  cloud  the  mood.  It  is  no 
use  arguing  that  Mr.  Sandburg  deliberately  adopts 
this  cumulative  and  arhythmic  method,  as  Whit- 
man did,  out  of  genuine  belief  that  such  a  method 
is  truer,  or  subtler,  than  any  other.  The  fact  is 
that  in  such  cases  the  temperament  comes  first,  the 
theory  afterwards:  we  write  in  such  and  such  a 
way  because  it  is  the  only  way  in  which  we  can 
write.  If  we  can  then  persuade  others  that  our 
way  is  best,  so  much  the  better — for  us. 

Classification  is  apt  to  seem  more  important 
than  it  really  is.  It  has  been  many  times  said 
during  the  past  few  years  that  it  does  not  so  much 
matter  whether  a  work  be  called  poetry  or  prose, 
provided  it  be  true,  or  beautiful.  This  study 
might  be  closed,  then,  by  simply  asking  a  question : 
is  Mr.  Sandburg  a  realistic  poet,  or  a  poetic  real- 
ist*? It  is  of  no  importance  that  the  question  be 
answered.  It  is  only  important,  perhaps,  that  it 
shall  have  been  asked. 

D48] 


XIV 

A  Note  on  the  Evolution  of 
a  Poet:  John  Masefield 

THE  hasty  critic  who,  when  "Good  Friday" 
was  published,  lamented  that  book  as  final 
proof  of  the  decline  of  Mr.  Masefield, 
meets  something  of  a  poser  in  "Lollingdon 
Downs."  Mr.  Masefield  is  of  that  type  of  crea- 
tive artist  which  is  most  distressing  to  the  critic 
with  a  mania  for  classifying:  he  will  not  remain 
classified;  he  is  for  ever  in  a  process  of  evolution. 
This  is  indeed  the  highest  compliment  that  could 
be  paid  him.  It  is  not  every  poet  who  is  capable  of 
growth  and  change  of  a  creative  sort.  With  most 
poets  the  only  marked  modifications  from  book  to 
book  are  technical.  They  adumbrate  in  one  book 
what  they  achieve  in  the  next.  They  mark  out 
their  province,  they  develop  it,  they  exploit  it, 
and  at  last  they  exhaust  it.  Consistency,  emo- 
tional as  well  as  intellectual,  rides  them  as  heavily 

D493 


SCEPTICISMS 

as  the  Old  Man  of  the  Sea.  They  are  the  one- 
strain  poets,  of  whom  we  become  accustomed  to 
expect  always  the  same  sort  of  tune.  From  a  psy- 
chological viewpoint  this  is  significant.  It  means 
that  these  poets  have  early  in  their  poetic  career 
achieved  what  is  for  them  a  satisfactory  abstrac- 
tion, or  algebra,  of  experience.  They  have 
formed  crystalline  convictions  which  will  hence- 
forth be  hard,  clear,  and  insoluble.  In  so  far  as 
we  value  their  viewpoint,  or  have  experienced  it, 
we  enjoy  their  work  and  give  it  a  place  in  the 
gamut  of  our  perceptions.  But  they  have  ceased 
to  interest  us  as  individuals,  because  they  inform 
us  obliquely  that  for  them  the  problems  have  all 
been  solved  and  there  is  no  longer  any  flux  in 
values. 

More  interesting,  therefore,  is  the  poet  who,  if 
he  does  not  always  progress  intellectually  (a  hard 
thing  to  determine  on  any  absolute  grounds),  at 
any  rate  changes;  he  provides  us  with  a  personal 
drama  as  well  as  a  literary.  Mr.  Masefield  is  of 
this  sort.  If  we  look  back  on  his  career  as  poet, 
we  see  a  perspective  of  ceaseless  change.  His  first 
mood,  in  "Songs  and  Ballads,"  was  unreflectingly, 
colourfully  lyric:  he  was  preoccupied  with  sensu- 
ous beauty,  and  with  its  transience,  in  the  roman- 


JOHN    MASEFIELD 

tic  tradition.  In  the  group  of  novels  which  fol- 
lowed, we  see  a  steady  shifting  of  the  attention 
away  from  the  merely  romantic,  or  decorative,  and 
toward  the  real  and  human.  The  romantic  atti- 
tude is  not  eliminated,  to  be  sure ;  one  feels  here  as 
later  in  the  four  long  narrative  poems  which  gave 
Mr.  Maseneld  his  greatest  success,  that  though  the 
material  is  often  rudely  naturalistic,  it  is  still  be- 
ing used  to  an  essentially  romantic  end.  It  is  the 
romance  of  the  realistic,  of  the  crude  and  violent; 
it  is  romantic  because  it  is  always  seen  against  a 
background  of  permanence  and  beauty.  This  use 
of  the  realistic  element,  the  vigour  of  the  common- 
place, reached  its  height  in  "The  Everlasting 
Mercy,"  "The  Widow  in  the  Bye  Street,"  and 
"Dauber."  In  "The  Daffodil  Fields,"  which  fol- 
lowed, one  perceives  the  next  change, — a  distinct 
relenting  of  the  naturalistic  mood,  a  softening  of 
both  material  and  technique  nearly  to  the  point  of 
sentimentalism.  The  hunger  for  hardness  and 
virility  having  been  satisfied  in  a  brief  and  mag- 
nificent debauch,  Mr.  Masefield  returned  to  his 
more  natural  taste  for  the  sensuous  and  lyric. 
The  poetic  plays  which  followed  were  further  de- 
velopments of  this.  In  spirit  they  are  closely  akin 
to  the  three  later  poetic  narratives:  the  motive 


SCEPTICISMS 

force,  the  emotional  compulsion,  is  an  almost  ob- 
sessive feeling  for  the  tragic  futility  of  man's  en- 
deavour in  the  face  of  an  outrageous  and  appar- 
ently unreasoning  fate.  At  this  everlasting  door, 
Mr.  Masefield  says  in  effect,  we  beat  in  vain.  One 
perceives  in  Mr.  Masefield,  as  he  says  this,  an  al- 
most pathetic  bewilderment  that  it  should  be  so, 
— but  a  bewilderment  which  has  not  yet 
reached  the  intensity  of  interrogation  or  rebel- 
lion. This  point  was  finally  reached  in  the  son- 
net series  which  composed  the  greater  part  of 
"Good  Friday."  In  these  one  gets  a  blind  and 
troubled  searching  for  spiritual  comfort,  a  cry  for 
some  sort  of  assurance  that  beauty  is  more  than  a 
merely  transient  and  relative  thing.  The  tone  at 
its  best  is  tragic,  at  its  worst  querulous.  The  or- 
acle is  dumb,  however,  and  Mr.  Masefield  implies, 
though  he  does  not  state  (and  in  spite,  too,  of  his 
passionate  adherence  to  Beauty),  that  the  silence 
is  negative. 

In  short  Mr.  Masefield's  evolution  as  a  poet  has 
been  cyclic — it  has  revolved  through  many 
changes,  but  always  about  one  centre.  This  cen- 
tre, which  has  been  at  times  obscured,  and  of  which 
Mr.  Masefield  himself,  like  most  poets,  has  been 
perhaps  partially  unconscious  up  to  the  present,  is 


JOHN    MASEFIELD 

essentially  romantic:  it  is  clearly  in  the  tradition 
of  that  romanticism  which  consists  in  a  pagan  love 
of  beauty,  on  the  one  hand,  and  a  profound  despair 
at  its  impermanence  and  relativity,  on  the  other. 
The  sonnets  in  "Good  Friday"  showed  us  that  Mr. 
Masefield  had  become  partly  aware  that  this  par- 
ticular emotional  well  was  the  feeding  spring  of 
his  whole  nature:  it  was  his  first  attempt  to  dip 
directly  from  the  source.  Now,  in  "Lollingdon 
Downs,"  he  has  completed  this  process.  The  echo 
of  personal  complaint  which  hung  over  the  former 
work  is  practically  eliminated.  Mr.  Masefield 
has  seen  himself  in  a  detached  way,  as  he  might  see 
a  reflection;  the  tone  has  become  one  of  calm  and 
resignation;  like  Meredith  he  has  managed  a  cer- 
tain degree  of  objectivism  and  can  accord  without 
undue  desolation  when  Meredith  exclaims 

Ah  what  a  dusty  answer  gets  the  soul 
When  hot  for  certainties  in  this  our  life ! 

This  volume  has  a  singular  and  intriguing  unity, 
a  unity  broken  up  by  interludes  and  by  a  succes- 
sion of  changes  in  the  angle  of  approach,  and  in 
time  and  place.  The  effect  is  that  of  a  several- 
voiced  music.  It  is  panoramic,  rich  in  perspec- 
tive,— passing  all  the  way  from  lyric  and  reflec- 

[153] 


SCEPTICISMS 

tive  sonnets  to  terse  poetic  dialogues  and  narra- 
tive lyric  almost  ugly  in  its  bareness.  It  would 
be  idle  to  pretend  that  Mr.  Masefield  is  a  philos- 
opher. He  is  not  intellectual  except  in  the  sense 
that  he  is  tortured  by  an  intellectual  issue;  he  is 
neither  subtle  nor  profound.  But  he  feels  this 
issue  intensely,  and  even  more  than  usual  he  strikes 
music  and  beauty  from  it.  On  the  technical  side 
he  has  few  superiors  in  power  to  write  richly, 
richly  not  merely  from  the  imaginative  point  of 
view,  but  also  from  the  melodic.  He  modulates 
vowels  with  great  skill;  he  knows  how  to  temper 
sensuousness  with  vigour.  Best  of  all,  he  is  pre- 
eminently Anglo-Saxon  in  his  speech. 


D54H 


XV 

The  Higher  Vaudeville: 
Vachel  Lindsay 

ONE  of  the  most  necessary,  but  certainly 
the  saddest,  of  the  critic's  many  detest- 
able functions  is  the  writing  of  epitaphs. 
It  is  never  pleasant  to  have  to  set  the  seal  of  death 
on  the  brow  that  inclines  for  a  crown.  There  is 
always,  moreover,  the  horrible  chance  (or  is  it  hor- 
rible— for  any  save  the  critic*?)  that  the  ghost  will 
walk,  that  the  apparently  dead  will  come  to  life. 
Nevertheless,  this  paper  must  be  an  epitaph. 
Vachel  Lindsay  is  marked  out  for  an  at  least  tem- 
porary hie  jacet. 

Mr.  Lindsay  has  never  been  an  easy  poet  to 
place  or  appraise.  Of  his  originality  there  can  be 
no  question.  Unfortunately,  originality  is  com- 
paratively a  small  part  in  the  writing  of  good 
poetry — it  is  the  seasoning  of  the  dish,  but  not  the 
dish  itself.  Mr.  Lindsay  has  always  toyed  dan- 

D553 


SCEPTICISMS 

gerously  with  theories  about  the  function  of 
poetry,  and  these  theories — particularly  those  that 
concern  the  revival  of  the  troubadour,  and  the  in- 
vention of  a  declamatory  and  orotund  style  in 
poetry  especially  adapted  to  that  end — have  al- 
ways, like  an  internal  cancer,  threatened  the  vital- 
ity of  his  work.  To  begin  with,  he  made  the  seri- 
ous mistake  of  assuming  (implicitly  at  least)  that 
in  order  to  interest  the  common  people,  to  make 
poetry  genuinely  democratic,  one  must  be  topical. 
One  sees  the  effect  of  this  in  such  a  poem  as  "Gen. 
William  Booth  Enters  Into  Heaven."  In  the 
present  critic's  opinion  that  is  one  of  the  most  curi- 
ously overestimated  of  contemporary  poems,  and, 
by  its  very  topicality  (as  well  as  by  its  too  jingling 
use  of  rhyme  and  rhythm)  is  destined  to  short  life. 
In  the  last  analysis  it  is  thin  and  trivial ;  the  partic- 
ular has  not  been  raised  to  the  plane  of  the  uni- 
versal. In  his  "Moon  Poems"  Mr.  Lindsay  al- 
lowed his  talent  for  delicate  fancy  free  play  with 
far  better  results.  In  "The  Congo,"  too,  there 
was  rhythmic  beauty  and  barbaric  colour — almost 
enough,  at  any  rate,  to  compensate  for  the  rather 
childish  echolalia,  the  boomlay-booms  and  rattle- 
rattle-bings ;  though  even  here  one  wonders 
whether  these  blemishes  are  not  terrible  enough 
D56] 


VACHEL    LINDSAY 

to  preclude  the  poem  from  any  other  immortality 
than  that  of  the  literary  curiosity.  In  all  these 
poems,  however,  as  in  "The  Fireman's  Ball,"  the 
"Sante  Fe  Trail"  and  "Sleep  Softly,  Eagle  For- 
gotten," one  felt  keen  pleasure  in  Mr.  Lindsay's 
sonorous  vowels,  broad  and  rugged  rhythms  and 
lavish  colour.  One  might  deny  him  any  very  seri- 
ous estimate,  but  none  the  less  one  admitted  his 
charm  and  skill  as  an  entertainer. 

In  "The  Chinese  Nightingale,"  however,  any 
hopes  one  might  harbour  as  to  Mr.  Lindsay's  real 
potentialities  as  a  poet  are  for  the  time  lamentably 
set  at  rest.  With  the  partial  exception  of  the  title 
poem  this  book  is  Mr.  Lindsay's  own  reductio  ad 
absurdum  of  the  poetic  methods  and  theories  he 
has  so  much  at  heart.  In  "The  Chinese  Nightin- 
gale" itself,  in  spite  of  many  passages  of  an  even 
more  delicate  lyrical  beauty  and  magic  than  any- 
thing in  its  prototype,  "The  Congo,"  one  feels 
clearly  a  decay  of  the  metrical  and  linguistic  fibre; 
something  has  gone  wrong,  the  machine  is  whir- 
ring down,  one  experiences  a  sensation  of  looseness 
and  flatness.  What  has  happened?  One  turns 
with  alarm  to  the  other  poems  in  the  book  and 
one's  premonitions  prove  all  too  true.  Here  for 
the  most  part  is  only  a  tired  and  spiritless  echo 


SCEPTICISMS 

of  the  rhythms  that  once  were  spontaneous.  The 
tricks  stand  out  like  the  bones  of  a  skeleton- 
meaningless  refrains  endlessly  reiterated,  page 
after  page  of  insipid  lines,  platitudinous  ideas, 
banalities,  trivialities,  boyisms  of  rhyme  and 
metre.  Sometimes  Mr.  Lindsay  seems  to  be  wea- 
rily going  through  the  motions  that  once  made  a 
kind  of  magic;  sometimes  he  seems  to  be  hope- 
lessly attempting  his  turn  at  a  sort  of  heartless  and 
bloodless  vers  libre.  The  result  in  either  case  is 
a  dulness  seldom  relieved  .  .  .  often  relieved,  in- 
deed, only  by  one's  amazement  at  the  author's 
solemn  inclination  to  ambitions  so  childish,  per- 
formances so  amateurishly  and  stalely  inept. 
This  is,  in  fact,  topical  journalistic  verse,  in  which 
the  lack  of  gusto  or  subtlety  is  only  too  fiercely  em- 
phasized by  Mr.  Lindsay's  addiction  to  the  use  of 
refrains.  The  poems  on  "Kerensky,"  "Pocahon- 
tas,"  "Niagara,"  "The  Tale  of  the  Tiger  Tree"  all 
are  examples  of  this.  For  any  trace  of  Mr.  Lind- 
say's former  charm  one  must  turn  to  the  lyric 
called  "The  Flower  of  Mending,"  or  to  "King 
Solomon  and  the  Queen  of  Sheba."  For  once,  in 
the  latter  poem,  Mr.  Lindsay's  eternal  mocking- 
bird, his  infatuation  for  refrain,  serves  him  a  good 
turn. 

DS83 


VACHEL    LINDSAY 

Can  one  safely  prophesy  about  any  poet"?  It  is 
doubtful.  It  is  taking  no  very  long  chance,  how- 
ever, to  guess  that  if  Mr.  Lindsay's  abilities  are  to 
produce  work  which  will  survive  in  all  its  force  he 
must  abandon  many  of  his  theories,  suppress  the 
good  natured  buffoon,  who,  in  this  case,  so  often 
takes  the  place  of  the  poet,  and  remember  that  it 
is  the  poet's  office  not  merely  to  entertain,  but  also, 
on  a  higher  plane,  to  delight  with  beauty  and  to 
amaze  with  understanding. 


D59: 


XVI 


New  Curiosity  Shop  and  Jean 
de  Bosschere 


WHO  it  was  that  started  the  current 
poetic  fad  for  curio-collecting  is  a 
question  not  hard  to  answer:  Ezra 
Pound  is  the  man,  let  the  Imagists  and  Others 
deny  it  as  loudly  as  they  will.  Pound  has  from 
the  outset,  both  as  poet  and  as  critic,  been  a  curio- 
collector — a  lover  of  trinkets,  bijoux  of  phrase, 
ideographic  objets  de  vertu,  carved  oddities  from 
the  pawn-shops  of  the  past,  aromatic  grave-relics, 
bizarre  importations  from  the  Remote  and 
Strange.  There  is  no  denying,  either,  that  it  is  a 
delightful  vein  in  verse.  No  great  exertion  is  de- 
manded of  the  reader;  he  is  invited  merely  to 
pause  before  the  display-window  and  to  glance,  if 
only  for  a  moment,  at  the  many  intriguing  min- 
utiae there  arranged  for  him  in  trays.  Is  he  tired 
of  struggling  with  the  toxic  energies  of  a  Rodin? 


JEAN    DE    BOSSCHERE 

Then  let  him  rest  in  contemplation  of  a  carved 
ushabti.  Does  a  Strauss  drag  his  spirit  through 
too  violent  a  progression  of  emotional  projections'? 
Does  a  Masters  overburden  him  with  relevant 
facts'?  A  Fletcher  fatigue  him  with  aesthetic  sub- 
tleties prolonged'?  Let  him  concentrate  on  a  gar- 
goyle. 

This  method  in  the  writing  of  poetry  is  to  be 
seen  at  its  purest  in  the  Others  anthologies,  the  sec- 
ond of  which  Mr.  Alfred  Kreymborg  has  edited, 
apparently  undeterred  by  the  success  of  the  first. 
Nevertheless  it  is  a  variegated  band  that  Mr. 
Kreymborg  has  assembled,  and  if  they  have  in 
common  the  one  main  tenet — that  their  poetic  busi- 
ness is  the  expression  of  a  sensation  or  mood  as 
briefly  and  pungently  (and  oddly?)  as  possible, 
with  or  without  the  aids  of  rhyme,  metre,  syntax, 
or  punctuation — they  are  by  no  means  the  slaves 
of  a  formula  and  present  us  with  a  variety  that  is 
amazing.  There  is  much  here,  of  course,  that  is 
merely  trivial,  and  a  measurable  quantity  of  the 
proudly  absurd  and  naively  preposterous;  but  if 
there  are  no  such  outstandingly  good  things  here  as 
"The  Portrait  of  a  Lady"  by  T.  S.  Eliot  in  the 
earlier  issue,  or  Wallace  Stevens's  "Peter  Quince 
at  the  Clavier,"  or  John  Rodker's  "Marionettes," 


SCEPTICISMS 

we  can  pass  lightly  over  the  studiously  cerebral  ob- 
scurantism of  Marianne  Moore,  the  tentacular 
quiverings  of  Mina  Loy,  the  prattling  iterations 
of  Alfred  Kreymborg,  the  delicate  but  amorphous 
self-consciousness  of  Jeanne  d'Orge,  Helen  Hoyt, 
and  Orrick  Johns,  and  pause  with  admiration  and 
delight  before  the  "Preludes"  and  "Rhapsody  of 
a  Windy  Night"  by  T.  S.  Eliot,  and  "Thirteen 
Ways  of  Looking  at  a  Blackbird"  by  Wallace 
Stevens.  It  is  not  that  one  is  at  all  indifferent  to 
the  frequent  charm  and  delicious  originality  (at 
least  as  regards  sensibility)  of  the  other  poets,  but 
that  one  finds  in  the  two  last  mentioned  not  only 
this  delicate  originality  of  mind  but  also  a  clearer 
sense  of  symmetry  as  regards  both  form  and  ideas : 
their  poems  are  more  apparently,  and  more  really, 
works  of  art.  In  comparison,  most  of  the  other 
work  in  this  volume  looks  like  happy  or  unhappy 
improvisation.  It  is  significant  in  this  connection 
that  Mr.  Eliot  uses  rhyme  and  metre,  a  telling 
demonstration  that  the  use  of  these  ingredients 
may  add  power  and  finish  and  speed  to  poetry 
without  in  any  way  dulling  the  poet's  tactile  or- 
gans or  clouding  his  consciousness — provided  he 
has  the  requisite  skill.  Mr.  Eliot's  "Preludes" 
and  "Rhapsody"  are,  in  a  very  minor  way,  master- 
[162] 


JEAN    DE    BOSSCHERE 

pieces  of  black-and-white  impressionism.  Person- 
ality, time,  and  environment — three  attributes  of 
the  dramatic — are  set  sharply  before  us  by  means 
of  a  rapid  and  concise  report  of  the  seemingly  ir- 
relevant and  tangential,  but  really  centrally  sig- 
nificant, observations  of  a  shadowy  protagonist. 


ii 

From  Mr.  Eliot  to  M.  Jean  de  Bosschere,  the 
Flemish  poet  whose  volume  "The  Closed  Door" 
has  now  been  translated  into  English  by  Mr.  F.  S. 
Flint,  is  a  natural  and  easy  step.  It  would  ap- 
pear, indeed,  that  Mr.  Eliot  has  learned  much 
from  M.  de  Bosschere ;  certainly  he  is,  in  English, 
the  closest  parallel  to  him  that  we  have.  It  is  a 
kind  of  praise  to  say  that  in  all  likelihood  Mr. 
Eliot's  "Love  Song  of  J.  Alfred  Prufrock"  would 
not  have  been  the  remarkable  thing  it  is  if  it  had 
not  been  for  the  work  of  Jean  de  Bosschere:  in 
several  respects  de  Bosschere  seems  like  a  maturer 
and  more  powerful  Eliot.  What  then  is  the  work 
of  M.  de  Bosschere'? 

To  begin  with,  and  without  regard  to  the  mat- 
ter of  classification,  it  must  be  emphatically  said 
that  this  book  has  the  clear,  unforced,  and  capti- 


SCEPTICISMS 

vating  originality  of  genius.  Whether,  as  Miss 
Sinclair  questions  doubtfully  in  her  introduction, 
we  call  him  mystic  or  symbolist  or  decadent — and 
all  these  terms  have  a  certain  aptness — is  after  all 
a  secondary  matter.  These  poems,  in  a  colloquial 
but  rich  and  careful  free  verse,  occasionally  using 
rhyme  and  a  regular  ictus,  very  frequently  em- 
ploying a  melodic  line  which  borders  on  the  proso- 
dic,  seem  at  first  glance  to  be  half-whimsical  and 
half-cerebral,  seem  to  be  in  a  key  which  is  at  once 
naif  and  gaily  precious,  with  overtones  or  carica- 
ture; in  reality  they  are  masterpieces  of  ironic  un- 
derstatement and  reveal  upon  closer  scrutiny  a  se- 
ries of  profound  spiritual  or  mental  tragedies. 
The  method  of  M.  de  Bosschere  might  be  called 
symbolism  if  one  were  careful  not  to  impute  to 
him  any  delving  into  the  esoteric;  his  themes  are 
invariably  very  simple.  One  might  call  him  a 
mystic,  also,  if  one  could  conceive  a  negative  mys- 
ticism of  disbelief  and  disenchantment,  a  mys- 
ticism without  vagueness,  a  mysticism  of  bril- 
liantly coloured  but  unsustaining  certainties. 
But  perhaps  it  would  be  more  exact  to  say  that  he 
is  merely  a  poet  who  happens  to  be  highly  de- 
veloped on  the  cerebral  side,  as  well  as  on  the  tac- 
tile, a  poet  for  whom  the  most  terrible  and  most 


JEAN    DE    BOSSCHERE 

beautiful  realities  are  in  the  last  analysis  ideas, 
who  sees  that  as  in  life  the  most  vivid  expression 
of  ideas  is  in  action,  so  in  speech  the  most  vivid 
expression  of  them  is  in  parables.  These  poems, 
therefore,  are  parables.  In  "Ulysse  Batit  Son 
Lit"  we  do  not  encounter  merely  the  deliciously 
and  fantastically  matter-of-fact  comedy,  naif  as 
a  fairy  story,  which  appears  on  the  surface;  we 
also  hear  in  the  midst  of  this  gay  cynicism  the  muf- 
fled crash  of  a  remote  disaster,  and  that  disaster 
arises  from  the  attitude  of  the  animally  selfish 
crowd  towards  the  man  of  outstanding  achieve- 
ment. He  refuses  to  be  one  of  them,  so  they  kill 
him.  "They  roast  Ulysses,  for  he  is  theirs." 
Likewise,  in  "Gridale,"  we  do  not  witness  a  merely 
personal  tragedy;  the  tragedy  is  universal.  We 
see  the  crucifixion  of  the  disillusioned  questioner 
by  the  unthinking  idolaters.  In  "Doutes,"  under 
a  surface  apparently  idiosyncratic  in  its  narration 
of  the  humorously  bitter  discoveries  and  self-dis- 
coveries of  a  child,  we  have  really  an  autobiog- 
raphy of  disillusionment  which  is  cosmic  in  its  ap- 
plicability. 

And  yet  he  still  believes, 
This  burlesque  of  a  man 
Who  has  given  himself  a  universe 


SCEPTICISMS 

And  a  god  like  an  immense  conflagration 
Whose  smoke  he  smells ; 
And  indeed  it  is  perhaps  only  a  bonfire 
Made  with  the  green  tops  of  potatoes. 

Nevertheless  he  still  believes, 

Ax  in  hand,  this  burlesque  of  a  man  still  believes ; 
He   will   cut   his   dream,   four-square,   in   the   hearts   of 
men.  .  .  . 

There  is  nothing  to  laugh  at,  nothing  to  object  to, 

We  are  not  animals 

Living  to  feed  our  seed. 

There  is  something  to  believe. 

All  men  are  not  made  of  pig's  flesh. 

There  is  something  to  believe. 

Who  said  that  I  am  a  poor  wretch, 

Mere  flotsam 

Separated  from  its  imaginary  god? 

Again,  in  "Homer  Marsh,"  we  make  the  acquaint- 
ance of  the  gentle  recluse  who  loves  and  is  loved 
by  his  house,  his  fire,  his  kettle,  his  pipe  and  to- 
bacco, his  dog,  his  bees;  but  he  goes  away  to  travel, 
and  lends  his  house  to  his  friend  Peter;  and  on  his 
return  finds  to  his  bewilderment  and  despair  that 
all  these  beloved  things  have  curiously  turned 
their  affections  to  Peter.  The  tone  is  lyric,  seduc- 

D66] 


JEAN    DE    BOSSCHERE 

tively  playful  and  simple;  the  overtone  is  tragic. 
It  is  a  translation  into  action  of  the  profound  fact 
that  ideas,  no  matter  how  personal,  cannot  be 
property;  that  they  are  as  precious  and  peculiar 
and  inevitable  in  one  case  as  in  another,  a  natural 
action  of  forces  universally  at  work. 

It  would  be  rash,  however,  to  carry  too  far  this 
notion  of  parables.  Some  of  the  poems  in  "The 
Closed  Door"  are  so  sensitively  subjective,  so  es- 
sentially lyrical,  so  naturally  mystic — in  the 
sense  that  they  make  a  clear  melody  of  the 
sadness  of  the  finite  in  the  presence  of  the  in- 
finite, of  the  conscious  in  the  presence  of  the 
unconscious — that  one  shrinks  from  dropping 
such  a  chain  upon  them.  All  one  can  say  is  that 
they  are  beautiful,  that  for  all  their  cool  and  pre- 
cise and  colloquial  preciosity,  their  sophisticated 
primitivism,  they  conceal  an  emotional  power  that 
is  frightful,  not  to  say  heartrending.  What  is 
the  secret  of  this  amazing  magic?  It  is  not  verbal 
merely,  nor  rhythmic ;  for  it  remains  in  translation. 
It  springs  from  the  ideas  themselves :  it  is  a  play- 
ing of  ideas  against  one  another  like  notes  in  a 
harmony,  ideas  presented  always  visually,  cool 
images  in  a  kind  of  solitude.  It  is  not  that  M. 
de  Bosschere  is  altogether  idiosyncratic  in  what  he 


SCEPTICISMS 

does,  that  he  sees  qualities  that  others  do  not  see ; 
but  rather  that  he  combines  them  unexpectedly, 
that  he  felicitously  marries  the  lyrical  to  the  mat- 
ter-of-fact, the  sad  to  the  ironic,  the  innocent  to 
the  secular — the  tender  to  the  outrageous.  He 
sees  that  truth  is  more  complex  and  less  sustain- 
ing than  it  is  supposed  to  be,  and  he  finds 
new  images  for  it,  images  with  the  dew  still 
on  them.  If  novelty  sometimes  contributes  to 
the  freshness  of  the  effect,  it  is  by  no  means  nov- 
elty alone:  these  novelties  have  meanings,  unlike 
many  of  those  factitiously  achieved  by  some  mem- 
bers of  the  Others  group.  This  is  a  poet  whose 
quaintness  and  whim  and  fantasy  are  always 
thought-wrinkled :  they  are  hints  of  a  world  which 
the  poet  has  found  to  be  overwhelming  in  its  com- 
plexity. Song  is  broken  in  upon  by  a  doubting 
voice;  flowers  conceal  a  pit;  pleasure  serves  a  per- 
haps vile  purpose;  beauty  may  not  be  a  delusion, 
but  is  it  a  snare "?  And  what  do  thought  and  mem- 
ory lead  to*?  ... 

Nevertheless  he  still  believes, 

Ax  in  hand,  this  burlesque  of  a  man  still  believes.  .  .  . 

Ax  in  hand !  It  is  precisely  such  bizarre  but  sig- 
nificant imaginings  that  constitute  the  charm  of 

[1683 


JEAN    DE    BOSSCHERE 

this  poet.  And  it  is  a  part  of  his  genius  that,  al- 
though hyperaesthetic,  he  is  able  to  keep  clearly  in 
mind  the  objective  value  of  such  images,  and  to 
contrast  them  deliciously  with  the  sentimental,  or 
the  decorative,  or  the  impassioned. 


XVII 

Narrative  Poetry  and  the  Ves- 
tigial Lyric:  John  Masefield, 
Robert  Nichols,  Frederic 
Manning 

IDEAS  are  like  germs:  their  dissemination  is 
rapid  and  uncontrollable,  and  to  stamp  them 
out  is  always  difficult,  sometimes  almost  im- 
possible. Moreover  their  vigour  is  frequently  out 
of  all  proportion  to  their  value.  Popularity  may 
not  necessarily  brand  an  idea  as  worthless,  but 
there  is  some  reason  for  regarding  such  an  idea 
with  suspicion.  It  is  fruitful  to  examine  in  this 
light  the  long  since  tacitly  accepted  or  implied  idea 
that  narrative  poetry  has  outlived  its  usefulness 
and  that  the  lyric  method  has  properly  superseded 
it.  Since  the  time  of  Chaucer  and  the  Elizabeth- 
ans there  has  been,  needless  to  say,  a  good  deal  of 
narrative  poetry — one  thinks  of  Keats,  Byron, 


MASEFIELD    AND    NICHOLS 

Shelley,  Browning,  and  Morris — but  nevertheless 
in  the  long  interval  between  the  middle  of  the  sev- 
enteenth century  and  the  present  it  is  fairly  obvi- 
ous that  the  focus  of  popular  regard  has  shifted 
steadily  away  from  narrative  verse  and  toward 
the  lyric.  Is  mental  laziness  the  cause  of  this? 
One  is  told  that  it  is  too  much  trouble  to  read  a 
long  poem.  It  is  presumably  for  this  reason  that 
Keats,  Shelley,  Byron,  and  Browning  are  popu- 
larly far  more  widely  known  for  their  lyrics  than 
for  their  more  important  work.  As  concerns  the 
relative  merits  of  the  two  forms  the  argument  is 
not  conclusive. 

The  lyric  began  its  career,  perhaps,  as  a  lyric 
movement,  or  interlude,  in  a  longer  work.  Un- 
der the  impression,  partly  correct,  that  the  lyric 
was,  after  all,  the  quintessence  of  the  affair,  it  was 
then  isolated  and  made  to  stand  alone.  Up  to  a 
certain  point  its  justification  was  its  completeness 
and  perfection  as  an  expression  of  emotion  at  a 
moment  of  intensity.  But  as  a  substitute  for  all 
that  goes  to  the  creation  of  narrative  poetry  its 
test  is  severer,  for  if  it  is  entirely  to  supersede  the 
narrative  or  dramatic  poem  it  must  usurp,  and  ade- 
quately, the  functions  of  that  form.  And  in  this 
regard  it  may  pertinently  be  asked  whether  since 


SCEPTICISMS 

the  days  of  the  Elizabethans  the  lyric  has  devel- 
oped very  far. 

In  fact  it  would  be  no  very  grave  exaggeration 
to  say  that  the  lyric  method  as  we  have  it  today  is 
in  all  fundamental  respects  of  practice  the  same 
that  we  have  had  since  the  beginning.  The  con- 
ception of  what  it  is  that  constitutes  the  lyric  scope 
has,  if  anything,  petrified.  This  is  particularly 
true  of  the  nineteenth  century,  when  despite  a 
rather  remarkable  development  of  lyric  poetry  on 
its  technical  side — all  the  way  from  Keats  to  Swin- 
burne— the  conception  of  the  lyric  as  a  medium  for 
interpretation  did  not  so  much  broaden  as  narrow. 
Did  Swinburne  really  add  anything  (not,  it  is 
meant,  to  English  poetry — to  that  of  course  he  did 
richly  add — but  to  poetic  method)  beyond  a  per- 
fection of  rhetorical  impetus,  a  sensuous  timbre  of 
voice4?  Did  Tennyson  do  more  than  reset  the 
poetic  material  of  the  past  to  a  more  skilful,  if 
somewhat  too  lulling,  accompaniment  of  sound? 
.  .  .  For  any  pioneering  in  the  nineteenth  century 
one  must  turn  to  Poe,  Whitman,  Browning,  James 
Thomson  ("B.  V."),  Meredith;  and  of  these  the 
influence  has  been  small,  particularly  in  America, 
and  when  felt,  felt  unintelligently.  The  popular 
demand  has  been  great,  as  always,  for  the  simplest 


MASEFIELD    AND    NICHOLS 

form  of  subjective  lyric,  for  the  I-love-you,  I-am- 
happy,  I-am-sad,  I-am-astonished-at-a-rose  type  of 
lyric,  prettily  patterned  and  nai've  with  a  sweet 
sententiousness.  And  the  supply  has  been,  and 
still  is,  all  too  lamentably  adequate  to  the  demand. 

It  is  in  reaction  to  this  situation  that  we  largely 
owe  the  recent  renewal  of  energy  in  poetry, 
signalized  in  England  by  the  appearance  of 
Mr.  Masefield's  and  Mr.  Gibson's  poetic  narra- 
tives, and  by  the  work  of  the  Georgian  poets;  in 
America,  by  the  issuance  of  "North  of  Boston," 
"Spoon  River  Anthology,"  and  the  anthologies  of 
the  Others  and  Imagist  groups.  Two  sorts  of 
work  are  here  represented;  the  dichotomy  is  obvi- 
ous, but  the  initial  impulse,  the  discontent  with  a 
lyric  method  which  had  become  practically  vesti- 
gial, is  the  same.  Messrs.  Frost,  Gibson,  Mase- 
field,  and  Masters  seek  renewal  in  the  broad  and 
rich  expanses  of  realistic  and  psychological  narra- 
tive: the  lyric  poets  have  sought  to  refine  on  sen- 
sory perception  and  delicacy  of  form.  The  work 
of  such  poets  as  Mr.  Lascelles  Abercrombie  and 
Miss  Amy  Lowell  falls  between  and  partakes  of 
the  characteristics  of  both. 

Three  recent  books  by  English  poets  illustrate 
our  point :  "Rosas,"  by  John  Masefield,  "Ardours 

D733 


SCEPTICISMS 

and  Endurances,"  by  R.  Nichols,  and  "Eidola," 
by  Frederic  Manning.  Mr.  Masefield's  new  nar- 
rative poem,  "Rosas,"  is  a  disappointing  perform- 
ance, quite  the  poorest  of  his  narratives.  Mr. 
Masefield  has  always  been  dubiously  skilful  at 
portraiture;  and  Rosas,  a  South  American  outlaw 
who  becomes  a  cruel  dictator,  seems  hardly  to  have 
aroused  in  his  chronicler  that  minimum  of  dra- 
matic sympathy  without  which  a  portrait  is  life- 
less and  unreal.  Is  Mr.  Masefield  on  the  border- 
line between  manner  and  mannerism1?  It  is  a 
danger  for  him  to  guard  against.  His  rhetorical 
tricks  are  here,  his  tricks  of  sentiment  too — not  so 
overworked  as  in  "The  Daffodil  Fields"  to  be  sure; 
but  if  "Rosas"  avoids  the  downright  pathos  of 
the  murder  scene  in  "The  Daffodil  Fields,"  it  also 
fails  to  manifest  even  fragmentarily  the  psycho- 
logical intensity  and  sensory  richness  of  that  poem. 
The  verse  is  fluent  but  colourless ;  the  narrative  is 
episodic,  bare,  and  ill  unified.  In  short,  we  read 
the  poem  with  very  little  conviction.  Most  ar- 
tists make  sometimes  the  mistake  of  choosing 
themes  unsuited  to  them,  and  it  look  as  if  "Rosas" 
were  the  result  of  such  an  error.  One  merely  re- 
cords one's  gratitude  that  Mr.  Masefield  has  not 
yet  abandoned  narrative  poetry. 

D743 


MASEFIELD    AND    NICHOLS 

Something  of  the  narrative  spirit  also  infuses 
the  work  of  Mr.  Robert  Nichols,  although  in  the 
main  it  purports  to  be  lyric.  "Ardours  and  En- 
durances," indeed,  is  one  of  the  most  remarkable 
of  recent  first  books  of  verse — perhaps  the  most 
remarkable  since  "North  of  Boston."  Mr.  Nich- 
ols is  young,  and  one  can  hardly  prophesy  of  him. 
At  present  his  style  is  a  rather  intriguing  blend  of 
Miltonic  and  new-Georgian  strains.  The  shorter 
war  poems  are  vigorous,  blunt,  and  genuine;  and 
the  "Faun's  Holiday,"  the  longest  and  finest  thing 
in  the  book,  though  it  is  studiously  and  enthusias- 
tically in  the  vein  of  "L' Allegro,"  can  quite  well 
stand  comparison  with  it.  One  can  think  of  no 
poet  in  a  decade  or  so  who  has  come  upon  us  with 
so  richly  prepared  a  sensibility,  who  takes  such  a 
gusto  in  sensation,  or  who  writes  of  it  with  such 
brio.  At  this  stage  in  his  development  a  poet 
may  be  said  hardly  to  need  a  theme:  anything  is 
an  excuse  for  writing,  and  with  enthusiasm. 
Whether  Mr.  Nichols  will  develop  on  the  intellec- 
tual side  and  use  his  instinct  for  word-magic  and 
sound-magic  in  the  articulation  of  new  tracts  of 
consciousness  (and  that  might  be  considered  a  defi- 
nition of  the  true  poet)  remains  to  be  seen. 

The  third  volume,  "Eidola,"  by  Frederic  Man- 

[1753 


SCEPTICISMS 

ning,  is  in  free  verse,  and  shows  an  attempt  to 
change  the  lyric  method,  but  not  so  much  by  addi- 
tion as  by  refinement.  It  cannot  be  said  to  be 
very  remarkable.  The  work  suggests  that  of  Mr. 
Aldington,  but  is  more  jejunely  precise  and  very 
much  less  vivid.  .  .  . 

If  one  finds,  therefore,  indications  of  change  in 
the  work  of  Mr.  Masefield,  Mr.  Nichols,  and  Mr. 
Manning,  one  cannot  say  that  in  any  of  these  cases 
it  has  yet  gone  very  far.  They  serve  chiefly  to 
bring  well  before  us  the  question  whether  we  are 
to  have  a  revival  of  narrative  poetry — perhaps 
more  psychological  than  Mr.  Masefield's — or  a 
new  orientation  of  the  lyric.  Whether  or  not  nar- 
rative poetry  is  doomed  to  decay,  we  must  hope  for 
two  sorts  of  development  in  the  lyric.  In  one  di- 
rection we  should  get  the  sort  of  thing  Mr.  Max- 
well Bodenheim,  Mr.  John  Gould  Fletcher,  and 
Mr.  Wallace  Stevens  tentatively  indicate  for  us,  a 
kind  of  superficially  detached  colourism,  or  what 
corresponds  to  absolute  music ;  and  in  the  other  di- 
rection, we  should  get  a  development  of  the  dra- 
matic lyric,  the  lyric  presenting  an  emotion  not 
singly  but  in  its  matrix,  beginning  with  the  situa- 
tion which  gives  rise  to  it  and  concluding  with  the 
situation  to  which  it  has  led.  Indications  of  this 

[1763 


MASEFIELD    AND    NICHOLS 

method  are  to  be  found  in  the  work  of  Mr.  Mas- 
ters, Mr.  Frost,  and  Mr.  Eliot.  ...  If  the  lyric  is 
to  compete  with  narrative  poetry,  or  to  supplant  it, 
it  must  certainly  develop  in  the  latter  of  these  two 
manners.  If  it  is  merely  to  evolve  further  on  its 
own  base — and  it  is  hard  to  see  any  excuse  for  its 
continuance  as  a  mere  bonbon  for  the  lazy-mind- 
edly  sentimental — it  must  choose  the  former. 


D773 


XVIII 

Confectionery  and  Caviar: 

Edward  Bliss  Reed,  John  Cow- 
per   Powys,    Joyce    Kilmer, 
Theodosia  Garrison,  Will- 
iam Carlos  Williams 

IT  would  be  doing  no  very  frightful  violence 
to  the  truth  to  say  that  one  could  divide  most 
contemporary  American  verse  into  two  great 
types — the  types  indicated  by  the  title  of  this  pa- 
per. If  one  leaves  out  of  account  the  matter  of 
poetic  form,  ignoring  for  the  moment  the  bitter 
quarrel  between  vers-librists  and  metrists,  one 
could  justifiably  conclude  that  all  our  contempo- 
rary poets  are  purveyors  either  of  confectionery  or 
caviar.  Two  or  three  exceptions  we  must  make, 
of  course :  Amy  Lowell,  clearly,  serves  a  melange; 
and  Messrs.  Frost,  Robinson,  and  Fletcher,  and 
perhaps  Mr.  Masters,  will  escape  our  classification 

[1783 


REED,    POWYS,    KILMER 

altogether — which  is  to  their  credit.  But  in  the 
main,  it  can  be  plausibly  argued  that  the  classifica- 
tion holds. 

The  confectioners,  of  course,  are  in  the  major- 
ity. These  are  the  prettifiers,  the  brighteners  of 
life,  the  lilting  ones.  They  fill  our  standard  mag- 
azines; they  are  annually  herded  by  Mr.  Braith- 
waite  into  his  anthology;  and  now,  taking  atfvan- 
tage  of  the  poetic  decuman  wave  and  the  delusions 
of  publishers,  they  are  swamping  the  land  with 
their  sweet  wares.  The  conservative  press  flings 
garlands  at  them,  the  Literary  Digest  quotes  them, 
the  Poetry  Society  of  America  (alas!)  fetes  them. 
Hourly  they  grow  more  numerous,  more  powerful. 
The  courageous  and  creative  ones,  and  those  who 
look  to  poetry  for  truthfulness  and  for  a  conscious- 
ness of  life  always  subtler  and  more  individually 
worked,  will  soon  have  to  fight  for  their  lives. 
And  how,  indeed,  shall  they  be  able  to  fight*? 
There  are  no  giants  to  be  slain — rather,  a  host  of 
pigmies,  and  all  alike.  A  poem  by  one  might  bear 
the  signature  of  any.  They  sing  in  chorus  rather 
than  singly. 

A  recent  group  of  volumes  by  Edward  Bliss 
Reed,  John  Cowper  Powys,  Joyce  Kilmer,  and 
Theodosia  Garrison,  is  an  excellent  illustration  of 

D793 


SCEPTICISMS 

this.  How  many  critics,  not  personally  ac- 
quainted with  these  four  authors,  would  know  the 
difference  if  the  names  had  been  shuffled?  Mr. 
Powys,  perhaps,  would  protrude — one  would  be  a 
trifle  alarmed  at  so  much  Weltschmerz,  so  many 
Sphinxes  and  heathen  kisses,  so  much  passionate 
frustration,  in  Mr.  Kilmer,  for  example;  and  one 
might,  the  case  being  reversed,  start  at  Mr. 
Powys's  so  speedy  conversion  to  Catholicism. 
But  even  here  the  difference  is  in  the  symbols  rather 
than  in  the  literary  quality.  They  are  both,  they 
are  all,  blood  brothers — sentimentalists,  dabblers 
in  the  pretty  and  sweet,  rhetoricians  of  the  "thou 
and  thee"  school,  pale-mouthed  clingers  to  the  arti- 
ficial and  archaic.  Here  are  platitudes  neatly 
dressed,  invocatory  sonnets,  the  use  of  italics  for 
emphasis  (that  last  infirmity!),  and  all  the  stale 
literary  tricks  so  relished  especially  by  the  female, 
— the  "calls  o'  love,"  the  "cries  i'  the  wind."  hom- 
ing birds, — in  fact,  the  whole  stock-in-trade  of  the 
magazine  poet.  Of  Mr.  Reed  these  remarks  are 
partially  unjust.  Mr.  Reed  is  too  well  bred  to  go 
so  far.  He  restrains  his  platitudes  from  any  at- 
tempt at  lilting;  his  gait,  indeed,  is  pedestrian. 
But  of  Mr.  Kilmer  and  Mr.  Powys  and  Mrs.  Gar- 
rison— particularly  Mrs.  Garrison — they  are  all 


REED,    POWYS,    KILMER 

too  true.  Here  is  nothing  new,  nothing  distinc- 
tive, the  trotting  out  of  the  same  faint  passions, 
the  same  old  heartbreaks  and  love  songs,  ghostly 
distillations  of  fragrances  all  too  familiar.  Is  it 
possible  for  individuals  to  be  so  little  individual"? 
Have  they  never  experienced  anything  for  them- 
selves*? Ideas,  emotions,  language,  rhythms,  all 
are  oddly  secondhand. 

The  trouble  with  these  poets,  at  bottom,  is  sim- 
ply that  they  are  imitative, — and  imitative  with  a 
sentimental  bias.  Recall  for  a  moment  the  study 
of  the  mechanism  of  poetic  inspiration  made  by 
M.  KostylefF.  The  conclusions  he  reached,  what- 
ever else  their  value,  were  highly  suggestive.  An 
important  part  in  poetic  creation,  he  maintains,  is 
an  automatic  discharge  of  verbal  reflexes,  along 
chains  of  association,  set  in  motion  by  a  chance 
occurrence.  The  difference  between  a  poet  who 
merely  echoes  the  ideas  and  rhythms  of  the  past, 
and  the  poet  who  creates  something  new,  is  simply 
that  in  the  former  instance  this  verbo-motor  mech- 
anism is  not  deeply  related  to  the  poet's  specific 
sensibility;  in  the  latter,  it  is.  This  distinction 
fits  the  present  case  admirably.  These  poets,  in 
other  words,  have  not  experienced  sharply  for 
themselves.  They  have  drawn  their  stores  of 


SCEPTICISMS 

verbo-motor  reactions  from  the  books  of  others, 
without  checking  up  from  personal  observation. 
They  colour  their  lives  to  a  certain  extent  in  ac- 
cordance with  their  too  early  adoption  of  a  speech 
which  is  not  their  own,  instead  of  colouring  their 
speech  in  the  light  of  their  own  experience.  They 
give  us,  therefore,  neither  clearness  nor  truth,  nor 
any  beauty  of  a  personal  kind.  They  give  us 
instead  a  tame  uniformity,  floods  of  tepid  rhet- 
oric, vague  regurgitations  of  the  words  of  others, 
varied  now  and  then  for  good  measure  with  the 
grotesquely  inept  and  the  foolishly  nai've.  And 
over  and  under  it  all  runs  our  undying  American 
adoration  of  the  pretty-pretty,  the  pious,  the  sa- 
cred virtues.  Life  is  made  out  to  be  simply  one 
sweet  thing  after  another.  These  are,  in  fact, 
confectioners,  and  not  inspired  ones,  either. 

With  the  question  whether  there  might  not  arise 
a  great  confectioner — one  who  would  bring  genius 
and  originality  to  his  task  of  enlightenment  and 
cheer  or,  if  not  that,  at  any  rate  another  Longfel- 
low— we  need  not  concern  ourselves  as  yet,  merely 
replying  that  there  will  be  time  for  discussion 
when  he  arises.  Meanwhile  it  is  more  interesting 
to  turn  to  a  consideration  of  the  type  of  poetry 
we  have  called  caviar,  and  to  Mr.  William  Carlos 

D823 


REED,    POWYS,    KILMER 

Williams,  who  brings  us  samples.  If  the  purvey- 
ors of  confectionery  are  almost  totally  lacking  in 
individuality,  the  purveyors  of  caviar  fly  to  the 
other  extreme:  they  carry  individuality  to  excess. 
These  are  our  modern  individualists.  What  do 
they  care  how  peculiar  or  esoteric  their  idiom  is*? 
Self-expression  is  the  thing.  If  the  crowd  cannot 
understand  them,  or  ignores  them,  so  much  the 
worse  for  the  crowd.  This  is  a  sentimental  atti- 
tude, there  is  a  good  deal  of  pose  in  it,  and  a  con- 
sequent defeat  is  easily  regarded  by  the  poet  as  the 
martyrdom  of  the  truly  great.  Nevertheless,  it  is 
oddly  significant  that  these  caviarists,  these  pur- 
veyors of  bitter  realism,  collectors  of  the  bizarrely 
unpleasant  and  the  irrelevantly  true,  have  a  style 
entirely  their  own.  M.  Kostyleff  would  admit 
that  their  mechanisms  of  verbo-motor  reaction 
are  closely  related  to  their  specific  sensibilities: 
they  are  as  clearly  original  as  our  other  poets  are 
imitative.  It  seems  to  be  true,  in  this  connection 
that  the  realists  have  a  much  less  stereotyped  style 
than  the  lilters.  They  appear  to  remember  that, 
after  all,  literature  should  be  drawn  from  life,  not 
from  literature.  They  experience  first  (and 
whole-heartedly,  not  with  a  fountain-pen  behind 
the  ear)  and  write  afterward. 


SCEPTICISMS 

Mr.  Williams  is  a  case  in  point.  His  book 
throughout  has  the  savoury  quality  of  originality. 
Is  it  poetry  ?  That  is  the  question.  Self-portrai- 
ture it  is — vivid,  acridly  sensuous,  gnarled,  by 
turns  delicate  and  coarse.  There  is  humour  in  it, 
too,  which  is  rare  enough  in  contemporary  verse. 
But  on  the  whole  it  is  more  amiable  than  beautiful, 
more  entertaining  than  successful.  The  reasons 
for  this  are  several.  To  begin  with,  Mr.  Wil- 
liams too  seldom  goes  below  the  surface.  He  re- 
stricts his  observations  almost  entirely  to  the  sen- 
sory plane.  His  moods,  so  to  speak,  are  nearly 
always  the  moods  of  the  eye,  the  ear,  and  the  nos- 
tril. We  get  the  impression  from  these  poems  that 
his  world  is  a  world  of  plane  surfaces,  bizarrely 
coloured,  and  cunningly  arranged  so  as  to  give 
an  effect  of  depth  and  solidity;  but  we  do  not  get 
depth  itself.  When  occasionally  this  is  not  true, 
when  Mr.  Williams  takes  the  plunge  into  the  pro- 
founder  stream  of  consciousness,  he  appears  al- 
ways to  pick  out  the  shallows,  and  to  plunge  gin- 
gerly. The  sensory  element  is  kept  in  the  fore- 
ground, the  tone  remains  whimsically  colloquial, 
and  as  a  result  the  total  effect — even  when  the 
material  is  inherently  emotional — is  still  quaintly 
cerebral.  Is  it  at  bottom  a  sort  of  puritanism  that 

[1843 


REED,    POWYS,    KILMER 

keeps  Mr.  Williams  from  letting  go*?  There  is 
abundant  evidence  here  that  his  personality  is  a 
rich  one;  but  his  inhibitions  keep  him  for  ever 
dodging  his  own  spotlight.  He  is  ashamed  to  be 
caught  crying,  or  exulting,  or  adoring.  On  the 
technical  side  this  puritanism  manifests  itself  in  a 
resolute  suppression  of  beauty.  Beauty  of  sound 
he  denies  himself,  beauty  of  prosodic  arrangement 
too;  the  cadences  are  prose  cadences,  the  line- 
lengths  are  more  or  less  arbitrary,  and  only  sel- 
dom, in  a  short-winded  manner,  are  they  effective. 
In  brief,  Mr.  Williams  is  a  realistic  imagist:  he 
has  the  air  of  floating  through  experience  as  a  sen- 
sorium  and  nothing  more.  He  denies  us  his  emo- 
tional reactions  to  the  things  he  sees,  even  to  the 
extent  of  excluding  intensity  of  personal  tone  from 
his  etchings;  and  his  readers,  therefore,  have  no 
emotional  reactions,  either.  They  see,  but  do  not 
feel.  Is  Mr.  Williams  never  anything  but 
amused  or  brightly  interested4?  The  attitude  has 
its  limits,  no  matter  how  fertile  its  basis  of  obser- 
vation. 

Of  course,  one  prefers,  in  the  last  analysis,  Mr. 
Williams  and  his  caviar  to  any  amount  of  thin 
saccharine.  It  is  at  least  real.  But  one  con- 
cludes that  the  richer  and  more  vital  realm  lies 


SCEPTICISMS 

midway  between  the  extremes:  in  the  truth-tell- 
ings of  those  who  not  only  see  sharply  and  know 
themselves  intimately,  but  also  feel  profoundly, 
relate  themselves  to  their  world,  and  tell  us  what 
they  know  in  the  comprehensive  balanced  harmony 
which  we  call  art. 


[186] 


XIX 

The  Return  of  Romanticism: 
Walter   de   la   Mare,   John 
Gould     Fletcher,     William 
Rose  Benet 

REALISTIC  and  romantic  movements  are 
commonly  supposed,  in  the  cycle  of  liter- 
ary  evolution,  to  be  alternative.  As 
soon  as  the  one  begins  to  dim,  the  other  begins  to 
glow.  But  one  of  the  curiosities  of  the  present 
revival  of  poetry  here  and  in  England  has  been  the 
simultaneity  of  these  supposedly  antipathetic 
strains.  "Sword  Blades  and  Poppy  Seed"  had 
scarcely  begun  to  make  itself  known  when  the 
"Spoon  River  Anthology"  and  "North  of  Boston" 
interrupted  the  festivities;  the  first  Imagist  anthol- 
ogy shrilly  intervened  only  to  be  rudely  jostled  by 
the  first  Others  anthology;  and  so,  ever  since,  the 
battle  between  the  realists  and  the  romanticists 

D873 


SCEPTICISMS 

has  been,  if  unconsciously,  at  any  rate  acutely 
waged,  and  seems  at  the  present  moment  no  nearer 
a  decision.  The  explanation  of  this  is  not  diffi- 
cult. Reaction  is  usually  the  propulsive  force  of 
an  artistic  movement,  and  in  the  present  case  it  is 
possible  to  maintain  that  the  rebirths  of  romanti- 
cism and  realism — a  curious  pair  of  twins — were 
occasioned  by  a  reaction  to  one  and  the  same  situa- 
tion. This  situation  was  the  amazing  decrepitude 
of  American  poetry,  not  merely  during  the  last 
decade  or  two  but,  with  the  exception  of  Whitman 
and  Poe,  during  its  entire  history.  In  general  it 
may  be  said  that  American  poetry  has  been,  when 
romantic,  romantic  without  imagination;  when 
realistic,  realistic  without  intelligence.  Of  the 
two  strains  the  former  has  usually  been  dominant 
— a  sort  of  ethical  sentimentalism  (naive  effort  to 
justify  puritanism  on  aesthetic  grounds)  supplant- 
ing any  attempt  to  think  or  imagine  freely. 
Home  and  mother  have  played  the  deuce  with  us. 
It  is  therefore  against  the  failure  of  the  realists 
to  think,  and  the  failure  of  the  romanticists  to  im- 
agine, that,  superficially  at  least,  our  modern 
realists  and  romanticists  have  respectively  re- 
volted. Are  these  terms  quite  adequate*?  Per- 
haps not.  We  might  more  accurately  say  that 

[1883 


DE    LA    MARE,    FLETCHER 

the  failure  was  in  both  instances  a  failure  of 
consciousness,  a  failure  to  perceive.  It  is  natural 
therefore  that  we  should  now  be  seeing  our 
realists,  on  the  one  hand,  constituting  themselves 
psychoanalysts,  and  our  romanticists,  on  the 
other,  making  a  kind  of  laboratory  of  aesthetics. 
At  the  same  time,  it  is  a  little  puzzling  to  suspect 
that  in  a  sense  the  roles  are  here  reversed. 
There  is  something  scientific — not  to  say  realistic 
— in  the  manner  in  which  our  more  radical  ro- 
manticists conduct  their  researches  in  aesthetics; 
and  certainly  it  is  an  adventurousness  bordering 
on  the  romantic  which  impels  our  more  radical 
realists  to  the  exploration,  not  seldom,  of  such 
sinister,  violent,  and  unfamiliar  souls  and  places. 
The  terms  may  prove  to  be  outgrown. 

If,  however,  we  take  refuge  in  some  such  state- 
ment as  that  it  is  the  function  of  romanticism  to 
delight  with  beauty  and  the  function  of  realism 
(psychorealism'?)  to  amaze  with  understanding, 
we  can  have  no  doubt  that  Mr.  Walter  de  la 
Mare's  "Motley"  and  Mr.  John  Gould  Fletcher's 
"Japanese  Prints"  are  in  the  romantic  tradition. 
Mr.  de  la  Mare's  position  as  an  English  poet  is  as 
secure  as,  in  a  period  of  such  amazing  flux,  it  is 
possible  to  have.  He  could  be  safely  said  to  share 


SCEPTICISMS 

with  Mr.  William  H.  Davies  first  honours  as  a 
maker  of  delightful  lyrics.  "Motley"  his  most 
recent  book,  will  neither  add  to  nor  detract  from 
this  reputation.  It  is  a  little  unfortunate  that  it 
should  have  been  heralded  as  signalling  an  advance 
and  expansion  of  Mr.  de  la  Mare's  talents,  for 
this  it  clearly  cannot  be  said  to  do.  The  most 
that  can  be  said  is  that,  on  the  whole,  it  proves 
Mr.  de  la  Mare  to  be  still  himself — engaging, 
whimsical,  and  with  a  delicious  knack  for  making 
conventional  metres  unconventional.  One  is 
likely,  in  appraising  the  latest  book  of  a  poet 
whose  work  is  familiar,  to  mistake  one's  failure 
to  be  surprised  for  a  decline  or  stiffening  of  the 
poet's  style.  It  is  with  some  diffidence  therefore 
that  one  confesses  to  a  feeling  that  there  is  not 
quite  the  clear  magic  here  that  illuminated 
"Peacock  Pie"  or  "The  Listeners,"  not  quite  the 
same  joyous  plunge,  but  instead  a  gray  sobriety 
which  does  not  suit  the  poet  so  well.  It  is  still 
the  overtones  of  the  supernatural  that  Mr.  de  la 
Mare  plays  on  most  skilfully — and  it  is  these  over- 
tones that  most  definitely  impel  one  to  call  him  a 
romantic.  Here  is  a  search  for  escape. 

It  is  curious  too  in  the  light  of  Mr.  Fletcher's 
later  work  (not  yet  gathered  in  any  book)  to  find 


DE    LA    MARE,    FLETCHER 

him  doing  in  his  "Japanese  Prints"  precisely  this 
same  thing.  Recently  Mr.  Fletcher  has  been 
feeling  his  way  towards  a  kind  of  realism — an 
acceptance  of  (but  also  an  attempt  to  sublimate) 
the  world  of  reality.  But  in  "Japanese  Prints," 
even  more  sharply  than  in  "Irradiations" — and 
certainly  more  conventionally  than  in  "Goblins 
and  Pagodas" — we  find  him  participating  in  the 
current  romantic  nostalgia  for  the  remote  and 
strange.  As  Mr.  Aldington  and  "H.  D."  have 
been  exploiting  Greece,  and  Mr.  Pound  and  Miss 
Lowell  exploiting  China,  so  now  Mr.  Fletcher 
takes  his  turn  with  Japan.  This  whole  tendency 
is  indicative  of  a  curious  truckling  to  reason:  one 
desires  to  talk  of  beauty  and  wonder  as  if  they 
shone  at  one's  very  door,  but  the  joyous  confidence 
of  youth,  the  only  magician  who  could  make  that 
immanence  a  reality,  has,  alas,  vanished.  Conse- 
quently one  admits  that  such  things  are  not  to  be 
found  at  one's  humble  and  matter-of-fact  door, 
and  takes  refuge  in  the  impalpability  and  marvel 
of  distance.  In  "Japanese  Prints"  Mr.  Fletcher 
has  made  this  excursion  neither  brilliantly  nor 
badly.  These  poems  are  slight,  pleasant,  some- 
times sharply  etched,  in  a  few  cases  magical;  but 
one  cannot  feel  that  they  will  compare  very  well 


SCEPTICISMS 

with  "Goblins  and  Pagodas."  Has  Mr.  Fletcher 
perhaps  a  little  too  studiously  attempted  the 
Japanese  method  of  compression  and  concentra- 
tion*? That  is  not  the  style  most  suited  to  him: 
he  appears  rather  to  be  the  sort  of  poet  who 
reaches  his  greatest  brilliance  when  allowed  to 
develop  rapidly  successive  musical  variations  on  a 
theme  capable  of  prolonged  treatment.  In  such 
work  words  evoke  words,  images  evoke  images, 
the  trains  of  association  function  freely  and  richly; 
but  in  work  like  the  present  he  has  restricted  him- 
self at  the  outset  to  what  can  be  achieved  by  an 
effort  of  intelligence  alone,  deliberately  exerted. 
It  is  Fletcher  the  craftsman  imitating  Fletcher  the 
poet. 

Mr.  William  Rose  Benet's  new  book,  "The 
Burglar  of  the  Zodiac,"  proves  him  certainly  to 
belong  with  such  romanticists,  but  little  else. 
Mr.  Benet  is  clever,  but  mechanical.  One  detects 
in  him  a  considerable  intelligence  working  through 
a  shallow  and  unoriginal  sensibility.  Neither  his 
rhythms  nor  his  color  seem  to  be  peculiarly  his 
own,  nor  has  he  apparently  any  sense  of  effect. 
His  best  work  is  a  jargon  of  approximations. 


XX 

The  Mortality  of  Magic: 

Robert  Graves,  Roy  Helton, 

New  Paths 

MAGIC,  whether  of  diction  or  of  thought, 
is  the  one  quality  in  poetry  which  all 
poets  seek  with  equal  passion.  But 
how  different  are  the  wiles  of  these  fantastic  hunts- 
men in  pursuit  of  this  golden  bird !  For  some  are 
bold  and  direct,  attempting  to  slay  the  creature 
outright;  some  go  warily  with  a  fine  net;  some 
wait  in  the  darkness,  hoping  to  be  found  rather 
than  to  find;  while  others  still — it  cannot  be 
doubted — trudge  patiently  through  the  forest  with 
a  handful  of  salt.  This  much  their  contempo- 
raries may  observe  of  their  appearances  as  hunts- 
men— but  of  their  success,  who  can  say*?  For 
magic  is  itself  a  changing  thing.  The  sparrow  of 
today  is  the  phoenix  of  tomorrow,  and  vice  versa; 
and  tomorrow  the  captors  of  sparrows  and 


SCEPTICISMS 

phoenixes  may  regard  each  other  with  changed 
eyes. 

This,  it  hardly  needs  to  be  said,  is  largely  a 
matter  of  diction;  and  this  again  is  largely  a 
matter  of  the  rate  of  growth  and  decay  in  the 
language  at  any  given  time.  Some  poets  resist 
the  growth  of  language,  some  merely  acquiesce  in 
it,  and  some  (like  Dante  and  D'Annunzio)  exult 
in  and  compel  it.  These  last  are  the  boldest 
spirits,  and,  on  the  whole,  the  most  likely  to  fail. 
"Will  this  word  live?  Will  this  word  die? 
Will  this  word,  tomorrow,  be  beautiful  or  merely 
vulgar?"  In  every  line  they  hazard  answers  to 
these  questions;  and  the  chances  are  much  against 
any  high  average  of  success. 

These  differences  in  the  attitude  towards  dic- 
tion set  gulfs  between  poets  who  would  otherwise 
be  commensals,  and  constitute  the  deliciousness 
and  futility  of  criticism.  Observe,  for  example, 
the  astonishing  unlikeness,  on  this  point,  of  "New 
Paths,"  that  most  interesting  English  anthology 
of  the  verse  and  prose  of  the  younger  men,  and  the 
work  of  two  such  poets  as  Robert  Graves  and  Roy 
Helton.  The  anthology  represents,  rather  con- 
sciously, a  band  (by  no  means  unvaried)  of 
pioneers — wrestlers  with  new  diction  and  rhythms, 


GRAVES   AND    HELTON 

pursuers  of  new  kinds  of  magic.  One  could 
gladly  forego,  it  is  true,  a  sort  of  Pre-Raphaelitic 
pinkness  and  faunishness  which  crops  out  here 
and  there,  as  in  the  work  of  the  Sitwells.  But 
many  of  these  English  huntsmen  have  attained  to 
a  subdued  and  cool  and  almost  intellectual  kind 
of  magic  which,  in  America,  we  do  not  know. 

At  the  same  time  one  cannot  help  feeling  a 
trifle  dubious  about  a  charm  which  is  so  conscious 
of  itself,  so  practised  in  self-exploitation.  It  is 
too  deliberately  nai've,  too  sophisticatedly  primi- 
tive. However  nicely  a  poet  may  write  of  sirens, 
fauns,  elves,  or  other  superannuated  evidences  of 
man's  thirst  for  the  supernatural,  nowadays  it 
inevitably  smacks  of  affectation. 

It  is  partly  because  this  fault  is  common  in 
England  that  one  is  delighted  with  such  a  volume 
as  "Fairies  and  Fusiliers,"  of  which  the  American 
edition  has  just  appeared.  This  is  forthright  and 
honest  verse,  Anglo-Saxon  in  its  vigorous  direct- 
ness, at  the  same  time  irresponsible  and  sure.  Mr. 
Graves  is  less  ostentatiously  serious  than  his 
sedater  contemporaries  in  "New  Paths,"  yet  one 
is  not  certain  that  in  the  upshot  he  does  not  come 
off  better.  Whereas  among  the  younger  con- 
temporary poets  one  finds  a  good  deal  of  emphasis 

D953 


SCEPTICISMS 

on  phrase-making  for  its  own  sake,  here  one  finds 
a  poet  almost  scornful  of  trappings  and  colour, 
intent  only  on  what  he  has  to  say,  and  saying  it 
vividly  and  musically  in  the  unaffected  language 
of  prose.  Certainly  these  are  among  the  most 
honest  and  vivid  war  poems  which  so  far  have 
come  to  us — and  if  Mr.  Graves  does  not  cut  very 
deep,  neither,  on  the  other  hand,  does  he  go  in  for 
the  usual  mock-heroics  and  sentimental  buncombe. 
Hear  him  in  "A  Dead  Boche" : 

To  you  who'd  read  my  Songs  of  War, 
And  only  hear  of  blood  and  fame, 

I'll  say  (you've  heard  it  said  before) 

"War's  Hell !"  and  if  you  doubt  the  same 

To-day  I  found  in  Mametz  Wood 

A  certain  cure  for  lust  of  blood : 

Where,  propped  against  a  shattered  trunk, 
In  a  great  mess  of  things  unclean, 

Sat  a  dead  Boche ;  he  scowled  and  stunk 
With  clothes  and  face  a  sodden  green, 

Big-bellied,  spectacled,  crop-haired, 

Dribbling  black  blood  from  nose  and  beard. 

This  approaches,  it  is  true,  that  sort  of  roman- 
ticism which  consists  in  the  deliberate  exploitation 
of  the  ugly  or  horrible.  But  for  the  most  part 


GRAVES    AND    HELTON 

Mr.  Graves  is  a  dealer  in  whim,  and  it  is  to  Mr. 
Helton  that  we  must  turn  to  see  that  method 
working  in  exfenso.  "Outcasts  in  Beulah  Land" 
qualifies  Mr.  Helton  for  admission  among  our 
realists,  but  not  as  yet  on  a  very  high  level.  For 
the  most  part  his  work  is  still  tentative  and  imi- 
tative :  one  swims  successively  through  currents  of 
Bret  Harte,  Masefield,  Service,  and  O.  Henry. 
The  rhythms  are  insecure,  the  narrative  psychology 
undeveloped.  Mr.  Helton  at  present  finds  it 
difficult  to  end  a  story  otherwise  than  in  senti- 
mentality or  melodrama.  At  the  same  time  it 
should  be  said  that  these  stories  are  often  vivid, 
richly — if  somewhat  commonplacely — imagined, 
and  on  the  whole  well-proportioned.  Most  of 
one's  objections  are  comprised  when  one  has  said 
that  Mr.  Helton  is  young.  As  for  diction,  Mr. 
Helton's  method  is  that  of  D'Annunzio  and 
Dante:  he  believes  in  using  the  demotic  tongue, 
neologisms  and  all.  He  is  willing  to  take  his 
chances  that  the  slang  of  today  will  become  the 
magic  of  tomorrow.  Unfortunately  he  does  this 
without  much  discrimination;  he  appears  to  be 
somewhat  insensitive  to  values.  Even  among 
neologisms  it  is  possible  to  distinguish  vigorous 
from  vulgar,  beautiful  from  merely  pretty.  And 

[1973 


SCEPTICISMS 

it  is  this  which  Mr.  Helton,  like  so  many  of  our 
contemporary  pursuers  of  new  magic,  has  failed 
to  do. 


D9SI 


XXI 

Varieties  of  Realism:  Wilfrid 
Wilson     Gibson,     William 
Aspenwall    Bradley,    T.    S. 
Eliot. 

MR.  WILFRID  WILSON  GIBSON 
seems  a  young  man  to  be  giving  us  his 
collected  poems;  it  is,  in  fact,  a  little 
startling  to  find  that  even  if  most  of  his  early 
work  is  omitted,  as  in  this  collection,  he  has  pub- 
lished so  much.  In  addition  to  the  more  realistic 
studies,  by  which  Mr.  Gibson  has  chiefly  earned 
his  reputation, — "Daily  Bread,"  "Womenktnd," 
"Fires,"  "Borderlands  and  Thoroughfares," 
"Livelihood,"  and  "Battle," — this  rather  un- 
wieldy volume  contains  also  one  poem  in  an 
earlier  vein,  "Akra  the  Slave,"  a  useful  reminder 
that,  like  his  fellow-poet  Mr.  Masefield,  Mr.  Gib- 
son has  evolved  in  manner  from  romanticism  to 
realism.  When  one  considers  in  this  connection 
some  of  Mr.  Gibson's  very  latest  work,  par- 


SCEPTICISMS 

ticularly  in  the  lyric  and  in  the  sonnet  form, — 
where  he  seems  tentatively  to  be  teasing  once 
more  at  colours  more  frankly  brilliant, — it  is  pos- 
sible to  suspect  that,  again  like  Mr.  Masefield,  he 
has  fed  himself  to  satiety  on  the  drab  and  realistic 
and  may  yet  revert  to  the  romantic,  an  evolution 
altogether  natural. 

Mr.  Gibson's  development  has,  however,  been 
more  obvious  and  orderly  than  Mr.  Masefield's. 
It  was  not,  in  his  case,  a  sudden  surrender  to  an 
overpowering  and  perhaps  previously  unconscious 
impulse,  but  rather  a  gradual  modification.  Even 
in  "Akra  the  Slave,"  for  example,  there  are  hints 
of  the  close  psychological  texture  which  was  later 
to  reach  its  maximum  of  efficiency  as  a  poetic 
style  in  "Fires"  and  "Livelihood."  In  "Daily 
Bread"  and  "Womenkind,"  pitched  in  a  colloquial 
dramatic  form  (or  dialogue,  rather,  closely  akin 
to  Mr.  Abercrombie's  use  of  the  same  form  in 
parts  of  "Emblems  of  Love"),  there  was  neces- 
sarily a  good  deal  of  waste.  Mr.  Gibson's  genius 
is  not  dramatic,  and  he  found  himself  precluded 
from  the  sort  of  step-by-step  objective  analysis 
which  is  his  keenest  pleasure.  Consequently,  this 
is  the  weakest  part  of  his  work.  In  "Fires,"  on 
the  other  hand,  lies  the  happiest  synthesis  of  all 
[200] 


GIBSON,    BRADLEY,    ELIOT 

Mr.  Gibson's  talents.  In  these  brief,  rhymed 
narratives,  dealing  for  the  most  part  with  the 
lives  of  working-people,  but  not  too  insistently  in 
a  drab  tone,  Mr.  Gibson  found  himself  free  to 
exploit  side  by  side  his  love  of  colour  and  his  love 
of  sharp  analysis.  The  result  is  a  sort  of  iterative 
half-lyric  analysis,  frequently  powerful.  In 
"Borderlands,"  "Livelihood,"  and  "Battle,"  how- 
ever, the  lyric  and  colourful  aspect  has  gone 
dwindling  in  proportion  as  the  psychological  pre- 
occupation has  increased.  Unfortunately,  the 
gain  in  truthfulness  has  not  entirely  compensated 
for  the  loss  in  beauty.  In  some  of  the  poems 
which  compose  the  volume  called  "Battle,"  for 
example,  it  may  be  questioned  whether  actual 
bathos  was  not  reached:  to  truthfulness  Mr.  Gib- 
son seems  here  to  have  sacrificed  everything,  even 
dignity.  One  admits  his  truthfulness,  but  one 
does  not  feel  it. 

It  is,  of  course,  too  early  to  attempt  a  placing 
of  Mr.  Gibson.  For  the  present  it  is  enough  to 
say  that  he  has  developed  a  style  peculiarly  effec- 
tive, and  valuable  too  for  its  influence  on  con- 
temporary poetry.  Mr.  Gibson  has  clearly 
proved  that  poetry  can  deal  with  the  common- 
places of  daily  life, — with  the  bitter  and  trivial 


SCEPTICISMS 

and  powerful  and  universal  commonplaces  of 
human  consciousness, — and  do  it  with  force  and 
beauty.  None  of  his  contemporaries  on  either 
side  of  the  Atlantic  has  equalled  him  in  power 
to  drag  forth,  link  by  link,  the  image-chain  of  a 
human  mood.  We  should  not  yet  begin  com- 
plaining that  these  moods  have  a  hypnotic  same- 
ness throughout  his  work;  nor  that  he  varies  the 
monotony  of  these  analytical  studies  with  too  little 
of  that  romantic  flush  which,  one  cannot  help 
thinking,  no  less  than  an  excessive  love  of  matter- 
of-fact,  is  a  part  of  consciousness.  Mr.  Gibson 
lacks  the  lyric  elan  for  this,  just  as  he  also  lacks 
flexibility  of  technique.  But  these  are  questions 
which  perhaps  will  be  settled  anew  with  every 
epoch  according  to  the  prevailing  taste;  one  can- 
not be  dogmatic  about  them.  Today  we  like  Mr. 
Gibson  for  his  dogged  truthfulness,  and  we  shy 
at  his  occasional  pedestrian  sentimentality.  A 
later  judge  may  conceivably  reverse  the  verdict. 
Mr.  William  Aspenwall  Bradley  is  obviously  a 
congener  of  Mr.  Gibson.  The  poems  in  his  "Old 
Christmas"  are,  for  the  most  part,  narrative  and 
in  much  the  same  form  that  Mr.  Gibson  is  most 
fond  of  using:  the  octosyllabic  couplet.  It  can- 
not be  pretended  that  this  is  poetry  of  a  high  order; 
[202] 


GIBSON,    BRADLEY,    ELIOT 

but  Mr.  Bradley,  in  adapting  to  his  use  the  life 
of  the  Kentucky  mountain-folk,  has  hit  upon 
extremely  interesting  material;  he  has  given  us 
some  excellent  stories,  told  in  the  folk-language, 
with  many  quaintnesses  of  idiom,  and,  on  the 
whole,  with  the  simplicity  and  economy  that 
makes  for  effect.  Mr.  Bradley's  technique  is  use- 
ful rather  than  brilliant — he  seldom  rises  above 
the  level  of  the  story-teller.  In  "Saul  of  the 
Mountains,"  "Old  Christmas,"  or  the  "Prince  of 
Peace,"  the  story  obviously  is  the  thing,  and  the 
story  does  the  trick.  When,  as  occasionally  hap- 
pens, Mr.  Bradley  shows  genuine  imaginative 
power  (as  in  the  "Strange  Woman"  and  its 
sequel)  it  is  hard  to  say  how  much  that  power  is 
fortuitous. 

Mr.  T.  S.  Eliot,  whose  book  "Prufrock  and 
Other  Observations"  is  really  hardly  more  than 
a  pamphlet,  is  also  a  realist,  but  of  a  different 
sort.  Like  Mr.  Gibson,  Mr.  Eliot  is  a  psycholo- 
gist; but  his  intuitions  are  keener;  his  technique 
subtler.  For  the  two  semi-narrative  psychologi- 
cal portraits  which  form  the  greater  and  better 
part  of  his  book,  "The  Love  Song  of  J.  Alfred 
Prufrock"  and  "The  Portrait  of  a  Lady,"  one 
can  have  little  but  praise.  This  is  psychological 
[203] 


SCEPTICISMS 

realism,  but  in  a  highly  subjective  or  introspective 
vein;  whereas  Mr.  Gibson,  for  example,  gives 
us,  in  the  third  person,  the  reactions  of  an 
individual  to  a  situation  which  is  largely  external 
(an  accident,  let  us  say),  Mr.  Eliot  gives  us,  in 
the  first  person,  the  reactions  of  an  individual  to  a 
situation  for  which  to  a  large  extent  his  own 
character  is  responsible.  Such  work  is  more 
purely  autobiographic  than  the  other — the  field  is 
narrowed,  and  the  terms  are  idiosyncratic  (some- 
times almost  blindly  so).  The  dangers  of  such 
work  are  obvious:  one  must  be  certain  that  one's 
mental  character  and  idiom  are  sufficiently  close 
to  the  norm  to  be  comprehensible  or  significant. 
In  this  respect,  Mr.  Eliot  is  near  the  border-line. 
His  temperament  is  peculiar,  it  is  sometimes,  as 
remarked  heretofore,  almost  bafflingly  peculiar, 
but  on  the  whole  it  is  the  average  hyperaesthetic 
one  with  a  good  deal  of  introspective  curiosity;  it 
will  puzzle  many,  it  will  delight  a  few.  Mr. 
Eliot  writes  pungently  and  sharply,  with  an  eye 
for  unexpected  and  vivid  details,  and,  particularly 
in  the  two  longer  poems  and  in  "The  Rhapsody  of 
a  Windy  Night,"  he  shows  himself  to  be  an  ex- 
ceptionally acute  technician.  Such  free  rhyme  as 
this,  with  irregular  line  lengths,  is  difficult  to  write 
[204] 


GIBSON,    BRADLEY,    ELIOT 

well,  and  Mr.  Eliot  does  it  well  enough  to  make 
one  wonder  whether  such  a  form  is  not  what  the 
adorers  of  free  verse  will  eventually  have  to  come 
to.  In  the  rest  of  Mr.  Eliot's  volume  one  finds 
the  piquant  and  the  trivial  in  about  equal  pro- 
portions. 


[205] 


XXII 

American  Richness  and 
English  Distinction:    Ralph 
Hodgson,    Harold    Monro, 
Walter  de  la  Mare 

IF  there  is  one  respect  in  which  contemporary 
English  poetry  is  conspicuously  and  consist- 
ently superior  to  contemporary  American 
poetry,  it  is  in  the  lyric.  While  their  more  ad- 
venturous fellowcraftsmen  in  America  have  been 
experimenting,  perhaps  a  little  recklessly,  with 
narrative,  epic,  and  symphonic  verse,  and  with 
bizarre  arythmics  and  insoluble  self -symbolisms  of 
all  sorts,  the  English  poets,  with  one  or  two  excep- 
tions, have  held  more  clearly  to  the  lyric  tradition. 
This  is  not  the  cause,  as  some  appear  to  think, 
for  either  heartburnings  or  self-congratulations. 
Poetry  is  poetry  no  matter  where  or  how  it  is  writ- 
ten, art  should  not  be  regarded  from  a  narrowly 
and  selfishly  national  standpoint,  and  we  should 
[206] 


HODGSON    AND    MONRO 

be  as  ready  to  applaud  a  foreign  artist  as  an 
American.  As  a  theory,  this  is  of  course  a  plati- 
tude; as  a  fact,  it  might  in  some  quarters  be 
regarded  as  an  alarming  novelty.  As  a  practice, 
moreover,  it  meets  opposition  because  it  demands 
the  application  of  a  high  degree  of  fair-mindedness 
and  intelligence.  One  must  face,  in  all  foreign 
art,  a  considerable  divergence  from  one's  own  in 
temper  and  method;  and  face  it  with  understand- 
ing. It  is  different,  but  is  it  necessarily  inferior'? 
These  problems  have  been  often  raised  in  the 
last  few  years  over  the  question  as  to  the  relative 
merits  of  contemporary  English  and  American 
poetry.  Foolish  things  have  been  said  on  both 
sides  of  the  Atlantic, — the  patriotic  instinct  has 
been  as  vigorous  and  cloistral  in  Poetry  and 
Drama,  of  London,  as  in  Poetry,  of  Chicago. 
In  general  the  failure  has  been  one  of  understand- 
ing, aided  in  some  cases  by  a  disposition  to  con- 
demn, a  priori,  without  consulting  the  evidence. 
It  is  encouraging  to  see  signs  that  this  attitude  is 
breaking  down.  The  fact  that  the  whole  poetic 
firmament  is  in  such  a  state  of  chaos  has  of  itself 
made  it  necessary  for  critics  to  discard  easy  tradi- 
tional theories  and  employ  methods  a  little  more 
empirical.  This  has  resulted  in  greater  fairness 
[207] 


SCEPTICISMS 

to  the  individual — it  has  even  gone  so  far,  at 
times,  as  to  indicate  complete  anarchy,  in  which 
bad  was  as  loudly  acclaimed  as  good.  The  up- 
shot, however,  has  been  the  establishment  of  a 
middle  attitude  of  good-humoured,  first-hand 
analysis,  toward  foreign  art  as  well  as  domestic. 

It  is  with  this  attitude  that  we  should  approach 
the  work  of  such  poets  as  Mr.  Hodgson,  Mr.  de 
la  Mare,  and  Mr.  Monro.  If  we  have  developed 
a  taste  for  work  more  racily  American,  more 
conspicuously  of  the  place  and  moment,  we  may 
conceivably  feel  that  we  are  stepping  back  two 
or  three  decades  when  we  read,  for  example, 
the  poems  of  Mr.  Hodgson.  We  should  not 
allow  this  to  prevent  our  enjoyment  of  their 
unique  charm  and  originality.  Mr.  Hodgson  is 
that  rarity  in  these  times,  a  poet  of  very  small 
production,  and  of  production  on  a  uniformly 
high  level,  a  poet  who  had  already  earned  a 
reputation  before  the  printing  of  his  first  book. 
His  range  is  not  wide.  A  single  tone  dominates 
nearly  all  the  twenty-five  poems  in  his  "Poems" — 
whether  in  the  narrative  lyrics,  such  as  "The 
Bull,"  "Eve,"  "The  Song  of  Honour,"  and  "The 
Gipsy  Girl,"  or  in  the  simple  lyrics,  such  as 
"Time,  You  Old  Gipsy  Man,"  and  "Stupidity 
[208] 


HODGSON    AND    MONRO 

Street."  The  metrical  variety  is  not  great,  the 
melody  is  always  open;  but  Mr.  Hodgson 
possesses  a  genuine  gift  for  modulation  which 
carries  him  safely  over  inversions  that  to  others 
would  have  proved  fatal.  If  Mr.  Hodgson's 
abilities  stopped  there,  his  verse  would  be  charm- 
ing, but  empty;  these  are  matters  of  the  voice 
merely.  But  Mr.  Hodgson's  chief  value  lies 
rather  in  what  he  has  to  say.  There  are  two  arts 
in  poetry:  the  art  of  precisely  saying  what  one 
has  in  mind;  and,  even  more  important  (though 
less  regarded),  the  art  of  excluding  from  one's 
conception  all  that  is  not  of  pure  value.  It  is 
particularly  in  this  latter  respect  that  Mr.  Hodg- 
son excels.  His  mood  is  always  perfectly  clear; 
the  terms  by  which  he  states  it  have  a  delicate  and 
sweet  precision.  Seldom  is  there  a  waste  idea, 
seldom  a  waste  line.  Mr.  Hodgson  does  not,  like 
many  poets,  have  to  take  a  running  start,  only  to 
generate  lyric  speed  when  half  way  through  the 
poem;  neither  does  he  exhaust  himself  altogether 
in  the  first  stanza.  On  the  contrary  his  poems 
have  that  clear  certainty,  from  beginning  to  end, 
which  constitutes  excellence  in  art.  This  would 
of  course  be  a  dull  perfection  if  it  were  not  for  the 
quality  of  cool  magic  which  is  woven  everywhere 


SCEPTICISMS 

through  Mr.  Hodgson's  work,  varying  all  the  way 
from  the  twinkle  of  whim,  as  in  "Eve,"  to  the 
graver  tones  of  "The  Song  of  Honour."  In  gen- 
eral, this  magic  is  not  so  much  the  magic  of  beauty 
as  the  magic  of  unaffected  truthfulness, — vigor- 
ously phrased,  nai've,  sincere.  One  feels  little 
trace  of  artifice,  even  in  so  fluent  a  lyric  as  "Eve." 
And  a  large  part  of  the  effectiveness  of  "The  Bull" 
is  in  its  honest  matter-of-factness. 

The  most  arresting  feature  of  Mr.  Hodgson's 
work,  however,  is  the  feature  which  is  most  likely 
to  give  radical  Americans  the  impression  that  he  is 
old-fashioned:  the  fact  that  though  he  is  essen- 
tially a  lyric  poet  (preferring  a  lyric  which  is 
narrative)  he  is  none  the  less  essentially  objective, 
— never,  or  seldom,  speaking  in  his  own  voice,  or 
developing,  psychologically,  any  personal  or 
dramatic  viewpoint.  This  is  an  attitude  which 
predicates  poetry  as  a  something  separate  from  our 
own  tortuous  lives,  a  something  additional,  perfect 
in  itself:  a  something  to  turn  to  for  delight,  which 
shall  take  us,  not  deeper  into  ourselves,  but  away 
from  ourselves.  This  attitude  adds  to  the  charm 
of  Mr.  Hodgson's  work,  but  it  is  also,  in  a  wider 
sense,  a  weakness.  It  means  that  the  greater  part 
of  human  experience  must  remain  unexpressed  by 
[ 


HODGSON    AND    MONRO 

him.  It  means  that  his  work,  in  spite  of  its 
realistic  or  objective  method,  is  in  the  last  analysis 
decorative  rather  than  interpretative.  Poetry  of 
this  sort  is  not  a  window  through  which  one  may 
see,  but  a  picture  hung  on  the  wall.  It  aims  by 
every  means  known  to  the  art  to  combine 
aesthetic  patterns  which  shall  delight  us  with  their 
colour  and  texture;  but  it  never  strikes  at  us 
through  our  emotions.  The  pleasure  it  affords  us 
is  serene,  cool,  detached.  Itself  produced  by  no 
very  intense  emotional  disturbance  in  the  poet's 
brain  (beyond  the  pathos  of  creation)  it  has  in 
consequence  no  power  to  disturb  the  reader.  It 
does  not  reach  forward  or  backward  in  human  ex- 
perience. It  is,  in  fact,  all  treble,  and  no  bass. 
The  darker  chords  of  intellectual  and  emotional 
frustration  which  shake  the  centre  of  individuality 
itself,  and  which  in  the  past  have  given  us  our 
greatest  poetry,  are  here  untroubled.  In  this  re- 
spect Mr.  Hodgson,  Mr.  de  la  Mare,  and  the 
Imagists,  antipodal  as  their  methods  are,  all  share 
essentially  one  purpose. 

The  work  of  Mr.  Monro  is  from  this  stand- 
point the  direct  antithesis  of  Mr.  Hodgson's  work. 
Mr.  Monro  is,  if  the  expression  may  be  used,  a 
psychological  realist.  If  he  is  by  no  means  the 


SCEPTICISMS 

equal  of  Mr.  Hodgson  in  point  of  lyricism  or 
natural  magic  or  roundness  of  form,  he  somewhat 
makes  up  for  this  in  greater  richness  and  variety 
and  in  what  must  be  called,  for  lack  of  a  better 
word,  the  quality  of  humanness.  It  is  daily,  per- 
sonal experience  that  interests  Mr.  Monro — 
personal  experience  viewed  from  the  individual 
centre,  observed  almost  religiously  as  it  flows  from 
moment  to  moment  in  the  stream  of  consciousness. 
This  is  in  the  strain  which  is  perhaps  the  richest 
in  potentialities  among  modern  tendencies  in 
poetry.  To  a  considerable  extent  it  implies  the 
transference  of  the  method  of  the  psychological 
novel  or  play  to  poetry:  in  the  end  it  is  nothing 
less  than  a  poetic  study  of  consciousness  itself. 
In  this  respect  Mr.  Monro's  method  is  right  rather 
than  successful.  His  speech,  if  robust,  is  crabbed, 
muttering,  and  laborious.  His  preoccupation 
with  the  profound  trivialities  which  make  up  our 
lives,  though  often  fresh  and  delightful,  as  in 
parts  of  the  two  series  called  "Week  End"  and 
"Strange  Meetings,"  sometimes  merely  results  in 
amiable  catalogues,  humourously  tinged  with 
panpsychism.  Along,  too,  with  a  good  deal  of 
imaginative  richness  Mr.  Monro  displays  an  un- 
fortunate tendency  to  push  quaintness  and  whim 


HODGSON    AND    MONRO 

to  the  verge  of  preciosity.  Should  a  train,  for 
instance,  be  said  ever  to  "tittle  tattle  a  tame 
tattoon'"? — This  is  an  example  of  a  good  idea 
not  quite  successfully  brought  to  birth.  It  should 
be  added  that  Mr.  Monro  does  not  do  this  often, 
and  that,  in  general,  his  work  has  an  intellectual 
saltiness  of  originality  which  makes  it  satisfactory 
and  often  delightful  reading.  And  as  was  said 
above,  it  gains  in  suggestiveness  because  it  is  in  a 
strain,  as  yet  infrequent  in  modern  poetry,  but 
probably  destined  to  great  importance:  the  strain 
of  psychological  realism;  although  Mr.  Monro 
cannot  be  said  to  have  taken  that  method  either 
far  or  subtly. 

Mr.  de  la  Mare's  "Peacock  Pie"  consists  of 
lyrics  ostensibly  for  children;  in  reality  it  contains 
some  of  the  most  delightful  work  he  has  done. 
It  is  doubtful  whether  any  other  living  American 
or  English  poet  can  weave  simple  melody  as  deftly 
as  Mr.  de  la  Mare,  melody  both  as  regards  words 
and  ideas.  If  after  a  century  has  passed  one  may 
recall  Leigh  Hunt's  categories  of  imagination  and 
fancy  as  the  two  springs  of  the  poetic,  it  would 
be  no  violence  to  say  that  Mr.  de  la  Mare's  power 
over  us  is  rather  in  fancy  than  in  imagination.  It 
is  delicate,  elusive,  impalpable;  over  the  simplest 


SCEPTICISMS 

lyrics  hangs  an  overtone  of  magic.  And  now  and 
again,  as  in  the  "Song  of  the  Mad  Prince,"  this 
magic  reaches  a  grave  intensity  which  strikes  well 
to  the  marrow  of  things.  Mr.  de  la  Mare  is  not 
an  innovator,  and  his  scope  is  not  great;  but  within 
his  scope  he  has  no  superior. 

If  after  a  reading  of  these  three  rather  typical 
English  poets  we  recall  as  contrast  the  dominant 
notes  in  contemporary  American  poetry,  certain 
differences  stand  out  conspicuously.  Despite  the 
fact  that  Mr.  Monro  manifests  a  slight  orientation 
in  a  new  direction,  we  may  say  that  these  poets, 
like  most  contemporary  English  poets,  hold  more 
or  less  surely  to  the  main  poetic  tradition,  in  par- 
ticular as  concerns  the  theory  that  lyric  poetry  is  a 
decorative  rather  than  an  interpretative  art,  and 
that  its  affair  should  be,  primarily,  the  search  for 
and  modulation  of  beauty,  with  or  without  regard 
to  its  nearness  to  human  experience.  The  result 
is  that  from  a  purely  literary  viewpoint  English 
poetry  of  the  present  day  is  much  more  perfectly 
finished,  much  maturer,  than  American  poetry. 
On  the  other  hand,  it  loses  proportionately  by  this 
very  fact.  By  comparison  with  contemporary 
American  poetry, — which  is  more  empirical,  draw- 
ing more  boldly  on  the  material  of  a  wider  con- 


HODGSON    AND    MONRO 

sciousness,  without  so  sharp  a  literary  distinction 
between  the  poetic  and  the  non-poetic,  and  more 
richly  experimental  as  concerns  questions  of  form, 
— English  poetry  appears  at  once  thinner  and 
more  "literary."  It  does  not  seem  to  relate  so 
closely  to  the  complete  life  of  the  individual.  It 
becomes  obvious,  in  view  of  this  contrast,  to  hope 
for  some  sort  of  fusion  of  the  two  methods.  Will 
the  poet  arise  who  will  have  no  occasion  for  envy- 
ing either  "this  man's  art"  or  "that  man's  scope"1? 
It  appears  to  be  only  a  question  of  time. 


XXIII 

Poets  as  Reporters: 

Edith  Wyatt,  Richard  Butler 

Glaenzer,  Christopher  Mor- 

ley,  A  Treasury  of  War 

Poetry 

POETS,  it  may  be  said,  quite  as  clearly  as 
scientists  or  historians,  are  reporters  for 
the  Journal  of  Humanity.     They  are  the 
scientists  of  the  soul,  or  as  others  might  prefer,  of 
the  heart,  or  of  consciousness.     We  can  imagine 
them  sallying  forth  into  the  city  of  consciousness 
to  report  to  us  what  is  going  on  there — some  of 
them  perhaps  to  get  no  further  than  the  main 
thoroughfare  or  the  shopping  centres,  while  others, 
bolder  spirits,  penetrate   to  obscure  and  dismal 
alleys  or  to  suburbs  so  remote  and  unfrequented 
that  we  are  at  first  inclined  to  question  whether 
they  exist  at  all.     In  any  generation  the  great 
[216] 


WYATT,    GLAENZER,    MORLEY 

majority  of  the  ephemeral  poets  are  those  who 
early  in  life  have  discovered  the  park  in  this  city 
and  are  for  ever  after  to  be  found  there,  loitering. 
One  conceives  them  as  saying:  "This  is  pleasant, 
so  why  go  farther"?  No  doubt  there  are  mean 
streets,  sinister  purlieus,  but  let  us  not  distress  our- 
selves over  them!"  If  we  reproach  them  for  thus 
misrepresenting  our  city,  for  exaggerating  the  rela- 
tive importance  and  beauty  of  the  park,  (calling 
them,  as  Freud  does,  wish- thinkers)  they  can  re- 
tort that  those  who  ferret  out  exclusively  the  mean 
and  sinister  are  quite  as  precisely  wish-thinkers — 
impelled,  as  Nietzsche  said  of  Zola,  by  the  "de- 
light to  stink."  To  this,  of  course,  we  reply  that 
our  ideal  reporter — who  turns  up  only  at  rare  in- 
tervals, as  a  Shakespeare,  a  Dante,  a  Balzac,  a 
Turgenev,  a  Dostoevsky — is  the  one  who  sees  the 
city  whole.  We  might  also  add  that  those  who 
report  extensively  on  the  shabby  purlieus  are  so 
much  in  the  minority  always  that  they  are  far 
more  worthy  of  encouragement  than  the  park 
loungers.  Their  influence  is,  in  the  aggregate, 
healthy. 

Miss  Wyatt,  Mr.  Glaenzer,  and  Mr.  Morley 
are  all  three  in  this  sense  devotees  of  the  park. 
But  if  they  are  at  one  in  thus  representing  the 


SCEPTICISMS 

park  as  of  supreme  importance,  their  reports  are 
delivered  in  manners  quite  distinct.  Miss  Wyatt 
is  clearly  more  aware  than  the  other  two  that 
there  are  other  aspects  to  the  city — she  has 
glimpsed  them;  she  alludes  to  them;  she  is  a  little 
uneasy  about  them.  She  has  heard  the  factory 
whistles  at  morning  and  evening,  and  seen  people 
going  to  work.  Is  it  possible  that  there  is  a  certain 
amount  of  suffering  and  fatigue  and  dulness  en- 
tailed*? Yes,  it  is;  but  at  this  point  she  closes 
her  eyes,  and  goes  into  a  dactylic  trance  with  re- 
gard to  wind,  rain,  flowers,  wheat,  waterfalls, 
sunset  over  a  lake.  Life  is  beautiful,  disturbing; 
it  moves  one  to  exclamation  or  subdued  wonder. 

The  Vesper  star  that  quivers  there 
A  wonder  in  the  darkening  air, 
Still  holds  me  longing  for  the  height 
And  splendour  of  the  fall  of  night. 

In  these  four  lines  Miss  Wyatt  gives  us  her 
poetic  attitude — hands  clasped  and  lips  parted. 
A  great  poet  could  endow  this  attitude  with  dig- 
nity and  power;  but  Miss  Wyatt  is  not  a  great 
poet.  She  lacks  on  the  one  hand  the  precision, 
on  the  other  hand  the  magic,  for  the  task,  though 
in  such  a  poem  as  "An  Unknown  Country"  she 


WYATT,    GLAENZER,    MORLEY 

comes  close  enough  to  the  latter  quality  to  make 
us  regret  that  she  could  not  come  closer.  She 
succeeds  in  making  us  see  how  beautiful  this  poem 
might  have  been,  by  comparison  with  which  vision 
the  actual  accomplishment  leaves  us  frustrate. 
Rhyme  and  rhythm — particularly  the  dactyl  and 
the  use  of  repetition — tyrannize  over  Miss  Wyatt, 
frequently  to  her  undoing;  and  this  sort  of  tyranny 
is  symptomatic.  It  relates  to  a  certain  emotional 
or  intellectual  incompleteness. 

Of  the  other  two  poets  Mr.  Glaenzer  is  dis- 
tinctly the  more  varied.  He  accepts  the  park 
gladly  and  without  question,  and  he  observes  it 
carefully.  His  report  is  mildly  rich,  blandly 
sensuous,  unoriginally  tuneful.  His  observations 
are  more  precise  than  Miss  Wyatt's,  his  technique 
more  secure.  On  the  other  hand  he  lacks  force 
or  direction,  he  seems  to  be  unable  to  transpose 
from  one  key  to  another  so  as  to  obtain  climax, 
and  the  exigencies  of  rhyme  lead  him  a  helpless 
captive.  It  should  also  be  remarked  that  his  sense 
of  humour  occasionally  fails  him,  as  when  he 
directs  his  plover  to  exclaim: 

Coddle  .  .  .  coddle  .  .  .  Hist! 
Expletives   of   this   sort — and   one    recalls   Miss 


SCEPTICISMS 

Lowell's  tong-ti-bumps  and  Mr.  Lindsay's  boom- 
lay-booms — are  dangerous,  to  say  the  least. 

Mr.  Morley,  one  is  at  first  inclined  to  add, 
would  not  have  made  this  error,  for  one  of  the 
dominants  in  his  book,  "Songs  for  a  Little 
House,"  is  humour.  And  yet,  on  second  thought, 
that  is  not  so  certain,  for  Mr.  Morley  has  a  dis- 
heartening talent  for  spoiling  an  otherwise  re- 
freshingly light  or  fancifully  humorous  lyric  by 
collapsing  at  the  close  in  a  treacle  of  sentimental- 
ity. Sentimentality  is  Mr.  Morley's  dark  angel, 
and  it  is  curious  to  see  how  at  the  first  whisper  of 
its  approach  his  sense  of  humour  either  abandons 
him  incontinently  or  assumes  a  heavy-footedness 
and  loutishness  which  suggests  the  Teutonic — as 
indeed  his  sentimentality  does  also.  Thus,  as  an 
example  of  the  latter  quality : 

Pure  as  the  moonlight,  sweet  as  midnight  air, 
Simple  as  the  primrose,  brave  and  just  and  fair, 
Such  is  my  wife.     The  more  unworthy  I 
To  kiss  the  little  hand  of  her  by  whom  I  lie. 

And  of  the  former : 

More  bright  than  light  that  money  buys, 
More  pleasing  to  discerners, 
The  shining  lamps  of  Helen's  eyes, 
Those  lovely  double  burners ! 
[220] 


WYATT,    GLAENZER,    MORLEY 

One  must  turn  to  some  of  Mr.  Morley's  sonnets 
for  a  maturer  and  more  persuasively  imaginative 
touch,  or  to  his  parodies  for  a  surer  delicacy  of 
humour.  The  parodies  of  Hilaire  Belloc  and 
Edgar  Lee  Masters  are  excellent. 

If  these  three  poets  are  all  determined,  as  re- 
porters, to  emphasize  the  pretty  and  sweet  and 
to  ignore  the  surlier  and  more  tragic  demons  of 
consciousness,  one  finds  in  the  anthologies  of  war 
verse  edited  respectively  by  Mr.  W.  R.  Wheeler 
and  Mr.  George  Herbert  Clark  that  the  disposition 
to  glorify,  to  escape  the  unpleasant,  is  equally 
prevalent.  One  would  have  supposed  that  by  this 
time  war  would  have  become  so  terribly  real  as  to 
paralyse  any  such  attempt;  yet  here  they  are,  hun- 
dreds of  poets,  frantically  waving  once  more  the 
dubious  emblems  of  honour,  glory,  duty,  revenge, 
self-sacrifice.  So  unanimous  is  it  that  it  has  al- 
most the  air  of  a  conspiracy.  An  amazing  in- 
toxication! Yet  truth  has  many  ways  of 
revenging  itself,  and  in  this  instance  it  does  so 
by  effectively  frustrating  the  effort  to  beautify 
war  or  make  pretty  poetry  of  it.  For  the  uni- 
formity or  failure  in  these  two  collections  is 
nothing  short  of  astonishing.  One  closes  them 
with  the  feeling  that  few  if  any  of  these  poets, 


SCEPTICISMS 

even  those  who  have  made  names  for  themselves, 
have  come  within  a  thousand  miles  of  the  reality. 
They  shout,  they  exhort,  they  lament,  they  paean, 
but  always  with  a  curious  falseness  of  voice;  it  is 
painfully  apparent  that  they  have  failed  to 
imagine,  or  more  exactly,  to  see.  Their  verses  are 
histrionic.  For  a  glimpse  of  the  truth  one  must 
turn  to  Miss  Lowell's  "Bombardment,"  in  a  richly 
imagined  and  dramatic  prose  (which  Mr.  Charlton 
M.  Lewis  dismisses  in  his  preface  with  patronizing 
fatuity),  to  Rupert  Brooke's  Sonnets,  to  Alan 
Seeger's  "Champagne,"  or  to  some  of  the  work  of 
Mr.  Gibson  and  Mr.  de  la  Mare.  For  the  rest, 
one  alternates  between  Kiplingesque  narratives  of 
incident  and  sterile  odes.  What  is  perhaps  the 
finest  poem  of  the  war,  Mr.  Masefield's  "August: 
1914,"  is  in  neither  anthology,  nor  is  Mr. 
Fletcher's  "Poppies  of  the  Red  Year." 

Are  we  to  conclude  from  all  this  that  poetry 
cannot  be  made  of  war?  Not  necessarily.  What 
immediately  suggests  itself  is  that  as  war  is  hide- 
ously and  predominantly  real,  an  affair  of  over- 
whelmingly sinister  and  ugly  forces,  it  can  only 
be  embodied  successfully  (with  exceptions)  in  an 
art  which  is  realistic,  or  psycho-realistic.  To  re- 
turn to  the  simile  with  which  this  review  was 

C222] 


WYATT,    GLAENZER,    MORLEY 

opened,  we  might  say  that  those  poets  who  are 
devotees  of  the  park  rather  than  of  the  slum  will 
almost  inevitably  fail  in  any  attempt  to  describe 
war  in  terms  of  the  park.  And  to  succeed  at  all 
is  to  falsify,  to  report  the  desire  rather  than  the 
fact.  It  is  of  such  failures — adroitly  written  and 
interesting,  but  ephemeral  and  with  the  air  of 
hasty  marginal  notes — that  these  two  anthologies 
largely  consist.  Meanwhile,  we  await  with  in- 
terest the  return  of  the  poets  from  the  trenches. 
It  is  possible  that  we  shall  then  learn  what  war 
is:  they  will  perhaps  tell  us  directly  and  simply 
and  subtly  what  a  human  being  really  thinks  and 
feels  in  such  a  fantastic  environment.  And  we 
shall  probably  be  surprised. 


XXIV 

Sunt  Rerum  Lacrimae: 
Chinese  Poetry 

WHEN,  a  little  over  a  year  ago,  trans- 
lations of  Chinese  poetry  began  to 
appear  over  the  signature  of  Arthur 
Waley,  the  literary  supplement  of  the  London 
Times  devoted  a  leader  to  a  panegyric  of  them 
and,  among  other  things,  predicted  that  the  whole 
course  of  occidental  poetry  might  well  and  for  that 
matter  might  profitably  be  changed  by  this  spiritual 
invasion  from  the  East.  The  writer  in  the  Times 
was  most  struck  by  the  total  absence,  in  Chinese 
poetry,  of  the  literary  artifices  which,  for  the  last 
twenty-five  centuries  at  any  rate,  have  made  occi- 
dental poetry  what  it  is.  He  was  moved,  as  others 
have  been,  by  the  bare  simplicity  of  it,  its  stalwart 
and  rugged  adherence  to  the  homelier  facts  and 
truths,  its  contemplative  naivete,  its  honesty,  and 
its  singularly  charming  blend  of  the  implicit  and 
the  explicit.  These  are,  indeed,  the  conclusions 
[224] 


CHINESE    POETRY 

which  nine  out  of  ten  readers  of  Mr.  Waley's  col- 
lection, "One  Hundred  and  Seventy  Chinese 
Poems"  might  justifiably  reach.  Mr.  Waley  has 
employed  as  his  translation-medium,  for  the  most 
part,  a  free  verse  in  which,  despite  his  preface  (he 
appears  to  consider  that  he  has  kept  the  rhythm 
of  the  original),  there  is  hardly  a  trace  of  any 
sort  of  rhythm  other  than  that  of  a  well-felt  prose. 
But  this  is  a  fact  which  (after  a  few  lines)  one 
has  completely  forgotten ;  for  Mr.  Waley  has  pro- 
duced a  book  which,  strictly  regarded  as  a  piece 
of  English  literature,  has  a  remarkable  beauty. 
As  poetry  one  has  little  but  praise  for  it.  It  is  a 
clear  enough,  and  precious  enough,  addition  to  our 
English  gamut.  If  one  has  any  quarrel  with  it  at 
all,  one  quarrels  with  it  as  a  translation. 

And  here,  I  believe,  there  is  some  ground  for 
thinking  Mr.  Waley's  book  misleading.  For,  as 
noticed  above  in  the  case  of  the  writer  in  the  Lon- 
don Times,  most  people  will  instantly  conclude, 
after  reading  these  deliciously  candid  and  straight- 
forward free-verse  poems,  that  Chinese  poetry  is  a 
far  simpler  and  far  less  artificial  affair  than  ours; 
and  many  who  already  incline  towards  the  less 
formal  of  poetic  methods  will  employ  this  as  the 
final  coup  de  grace  in  their  argument  against  an 
[225] 


SCEPTICISMS 

art  of  delicate  elaboration.  Their  argument,  of 
course,  gains  force  with  the  publication  of  any  suc- 
cessful book  of  free  verse;  but  of  the  historical 
argument  which  Mr.  Waley's  book  seems  so  com- 
pletely to  afford  them  they  must  be  deprived. 
For  Chinese  poetry  is  not  a  poetry  even  remotely 
akin  to  free  verse;  and  it  is  far  from  being  artless. 
As  a  matter  of  fact,  little  as  one  would  gather  it 
from  Mr.  Waley's  preface,  or  from  Judith  Gau- 
tier's  preface  to  "Chinese  Lyrics  from  the  Book  of 
Jade,"  or  from  Mr.  Cranmer-Byng's  preface  to  "A 
Lute  of  Jade" — all  of  which  are  in  almost  equal 
measure  informative  and  confusing — Chinese 
poetry  is  perhaps  more  elaborately  and  studiously 
artificial  (as  distinguished  from  artless)  than  any 
other.  The  literary  traditions  are  so  powerful  and 
inflexible  as  to  be  almost  ritualistic.  The  forms 
are  few  and  exactly  prescribed,  the  rules  many. 
When  it  is  recalled  that  the  Chinese  language  is 
entirely  monosyllabic;  that  the  variety  of  rhymes 
is  small;  that  all  words  are,  for  the  purposes  of 
poetry,  inflected  as  either  flats  or  sharps  (the  in- 
flection for  each  word  being  fixed) ;  and  that 
Chinese  poetry  employs  not  only  rhyme,  and  an 
exact  number  of  syllables  in  each  line,  but  that 
these  syllables  must  follow  a  precise  pattern  in 
[226^ 


CHINESE   POETRY 

accordance  with  inflection  (equivalent,  in  a  degree, 
to  our  ictus),  one  begins  to  see  how  complex  an 
art  it  is.  A  typical  four-line  stanza,  for  example, 
with  seven  words  to  a  line,  the  cesura  falling  un- 
alterably after  the  fourth  word,  and  rhyming  per- 
haps a,  <2,  £,  a,  is  as  follows : 

Flat  flat  sharp  sharp  flat  flat  sharp 

Sharp  sharp  flat  flat  sharp  sharp  flat 

Sharp  sharp  flat  flat  flat  sharp  sharp 

Flat  flat  sharp  sharp  flat  flat  sharp 

Almost  all  Chinese  poetry  of  the  great  periods  is 
stanzaic,  and  almost  all  of  it  is  short,  the  quatrain 
and  the  poem  of  eight  or  twelve  lines  being  the 
most  common  lengths.  A  few  poets  have  essayed 
longer  poems,  some  of  them  narrative — notably 
Po  Chii  I — but  these  are  exceptions. 

It  is  therefore  with  all  these  facts  in  mind  that 
one  should  read  the  translations  of  Mr.  Waley,  or 
Mr.  Cranmer-Byng;  or  Mr.  Whi tail's  translations 
of  the  French  versions  by  Judith  Gautier.  Of  the 
three  books,  Mr.  Waley's  is  distinctly  the  most 
comprehensive  and  from  the  literary  point  of  view 
the  most  successful.  The  other  two  are  usefully 
supplementary  however,  for  the  reason  that  the 
Cranmer-Byng  versions  are  for  the  most  part 
[227] 


SCEPTICISMS 

metrical  and  in  rhyme,  and  serve  somewhat  to 
correct  one's  impression  that  Chinese  poetry  is 
non-literary;  and  that  the  Whitall  book  consists 
largely  of  love  poems,  the  element  in  which  the 
other  books  are  weakest.  From  the  three  volumes, 
taken  together,  emerges  the  fact  that  Chinese 
poetry  is  among  the  most  beautiful  that  man  has 
written.  Artificial  and  elaborate  it  may  be  as  re- 
gards the  mould  into  which  it  is  cast;  but,  at  any 
rate  as  presented  to  us  in  Arthur  Waley's  book,  it 
seems,  by  contrast  with  most  occidental  poetry, 
poignantly  simple  and  human.  How  much  of  this 
we  must  credit  to  Mr.  Waley  we  cannot,  of  course, 
tell.  We  must  remember  that  it  is  above  all  else 
a  poet's  art  which  the  Chinese  set  store  by.  A  part 
of  the  charm  of  this  poetry,  stripped  of  its  art  for 
us  who  are  occidental,  must  inevitably  be  simply 
due  to  its  combination  of  the  strange  with  the 
familiar,  of  the  remote  with  the  comprehensible. 
But  one  is  tempted  to  go  farther  and  to  say  that 
Chinese  poetry  seems  more  than  any  other  a  cry 
from  the  bewildered  heart  of  humanity.  Sorrow 
is  the  most  persistent  note  in  it — sorrow,  or  sor- 
rowful resignation;  sorrow  for  the  inevitable  part- 
ings of  friends,  sorrow  for  the  home  remembered 
in  exile,  for  the  departure  of  youth,  the  futility  of 
[228] 


CHINESE    POETRY 

a  great  career,  the  injustice  of  man,  the  loneliness 
of  old  age.  The  Freudians  will  have  something 
to  explain  in  the  remarkable  infrequency  with 
which  it  deals  with  love  between  the  sexes;  it  is 
friendship  which  is  most  honored.  And  perhaps 
one  is  wrong  in  saying  that  these  poems,  even  as 
given  in  the  limpid  free  verse  of  Mr.  Waley,  in 
delicately  colloquial  prose-rhythms,  are  altogether 
artless.  The  rhythm  of  ideas  is  clear;  and  that 
sort  of  dim  counterpoint  which  may  be  manifest 
in  the  thought  itself  is  not  less  apparent.  Simple 
and  homely  as  appear  the  details  by  which  these 
poets  evoke  a  mood,  simple  and  homely  and  prosaic 
as  the  mood  itself  may  appear,  it  is  when  one 
attempts  retrospectively  to  reconstruct  the  steps 
by  which  any  such  mood-poem  was  completed  that 
one  perceives  how  exquisitely  selective  was  the 
poet,  with  what  patient  fastidiousness  he  searched 
for  the  clear  qualities  of  things,  and  with  what  a 
magical  precision  he  found  just  that  tone  of  re- 
straint, almost  of  matter-of-factness,  which  fairly 
whizzed  with  overtones.  A  popular  form  of 
Chinese  poetry  is  the  four-line  poem  called  the 
stop-short,  in  which  the  sense  is  supposed  to  con- 
tinue after  the  poem  has  stopped.  But  even  in 
the  longer  poems  that  is  almost  universally  the 


SCEPTICISMS 

method.  It  is  the  hum  of  reverberations,  after  the 
poem  has  been  read,  that  is  sought  for.  And  even 
such  a  narrative  poem  as  Po  Chii  I's  "Everlasting 
Wrong,"  one  of  the  famous  "long"  poems  of  the 
language  (though  it  runs  only  to  a  few  pages),  is 
constructed  in  accordance  with  this  instinct,  and 
is,  therefore,  really  a  sequence  of  lyrics. 

Does  all  this  mean  that  Chinese  poetry  is  pro- 
foundly unlike  our  own"?  Perhaps  not,  in  theory. 
Restraint  and  understatement  have  always  been 
characteristic  of  Anglo-Saxon  poetry,  though  not 
to  the  same  extent.  It  is  in  the  sort  of  theme 
chosen  that  one  feels  the  most  profound  diver- 
gence. Our  own  themes  are  apt  to  be  sublimated 
and  "literary,"  to  some  degree  conventionalized, 
no  matter  how  simple  and  colloquial  may  be  the 
treatment.  The  themes  of  the  Chinese  poets  are 
highly  conventionalized — the  same  themes  used 
over  and  over  again — but  they  are  essentially 
simple.  Sunt  rerum  lacrimae — it  is  the  pathos  in 
things  that  the  Chinese  poets  play  upon,  century 
after  century;  the  inanimate  things,  the  things  of 
humble  human  use,  the  small  utilities  which  we 
associate  with  lives  simply  lived,  supply  the 
medium  through  which  Li  Po  or  Po  Chii  I  or  T'ao 
Ch'ien  pierce  our  hearts.  One  is  struck  by  the 
C2303 


CHINESE    POETRY 

childlike  candour  of  this  poetry:  no  detail  is  for- 
bidden— as  it  would  be  in  our  poetry,  perhaps — 
because  it  seems  too  prosaic;  the  sole  question 
raised  is  as  to  its  emotional  appropriateness.  Is 
it  a  comb,  a  fan,  a  torn  dress,  a  curtain,  a  bed,  an 
empty  rice-bin  ?  It  hardly  seems  to  matter.  The 
Chinese  poet  makes  a  heart-breaking  poetry  out 
of  these  quite  as  naturally  as  Keats  did  out  of  the 
song  of  a  nightingale  heard  in  a  spring  garden.  It 
is  rarely  dithyrambic,  rarely  high-pitched :  part  of 
its  charm  is  in  its  tranquillity,  its  self-control. 
And  the  humblest  reads  it  with  as  much  emotion 
as  the  most  learned.  .  .  .  Was  the  writer  in  the 
London  Times  right,  therefore,  in  thinking  that 
this  poetry  might  be  a  wholesome  influence  for  our 
own*?  If  it  can  teach  our  poets  warmth  and 
humanness — qualities  in  which  American  poets 
are  singularly  lacking — the  answer  must  be  an  un- 
qualified yes. 


XXV 

Vox — et  Praeterea?     Maxwell 
Bodenheim 

IT  will  be  recalled  that  when  the  Imagists  first 
came  upon  us  they  carried  banners,  and  that 
upon  one  of  them  was  inscribed  their  detesta- 
tion of  the  "cosmic,"  and  of  the  "cosmic"  poet, 
who  (they  added)  "seems  to  us  to  shirk  the  real 
difficulties  of  his  art."  No  doubt  if  the  Imagists 
were  to  issue  this  particular  volume  again  they 
would  find  occasion  to  alter  this  and  perhaps  other 
statements,  for  here  as  elsewhere  they  sinned 
against  one  of  their  own  cardinal  doctrines — they 
failed  to  think  clearly  and,  ipso  facto,  failed  also 
to  define  with  precision.  Were  they  quite  sure 
what  they  meant  by  the  term  "cosmic"  poet*? 
Did  they  mean,  for  example,  Dante — or  only  Ella 
Wheeler  Wilcox*?  The  point  is  trifling,  it  may 
be,  and  yet  it  is  not  without  its  interest,  for  it 
indicates  an  error  characteristic  of  the  moment. 
It  was  not  unnatural  that  those  of  our  poetic 
[232] 


MAXWELL    BODENHEIM 

revolutionaries  who,  tired  of  the  verbose  senti- 
mentalities and  ineptitudes  of  the  more  mediocre 
among  their  predecessors,  determined  to  achieve 
a  sharper  picturism  in  poetry,  should  in  the  first 
excited  survey  of  the  situation  decide  that  any- 
thing "cosmic,"  or  let  us  say  philosophic,  was  ob- 
viously beyond  the  focus  of  their  poetic  camera — 
could  not  be  "picturized."  It  appeared  that 
thought  would  have  to  be  excluded — and  in  fact 
for  a  year  or  more,  under  the  influence  of  the 
Imagists,  the  markets  were  flooded  with  a  free 
verse  in  which  thought  was  conspicuously  at  a 
minimum.  "Pure  sensation !"  was  the  cry — a  cry 
which  has  been  heard  before,  and  will  be  heard 
again;  it  arises  from  a  question  almost  as  old  as 
poetry  itself — the  question  whether  the  poet 
should  be  only  a  drifting  sensorium,  and  merely 
feel,  or  whether  he  should  be  permitted  to  think. 
Should  he  be  a  voice,  simply — or  something  be- 
side *?  Should  he  occasionally,  to  put  it  collo- 
quially, say  something*?  Or  should  he  be  merely 
a  magic  lantern,  casting  coloured  pictures  for  ever 
on  a  screen  ? 

The  question  is  put  perhaps  too  starkly,  and 
purposely  leaves  out  of  account  all  of  the  minute 
gradations  by  which  one  passes  from  the  one  ex- 


SCEPTICISMS 

treme  to  the  other.  And  the  occasion  for  the 
question  is  Mr.  Maxwell  Bodenheim,  who,  though 
already  well  known  as  a  poet,  has  just  published 
his  first  book,  "Minna  and  Myself."  Mr.  Boden- 
heim might  well,  it  appears,  have  been  one  of  the 
Imagists.  None  of  them,  with  perhaps  the  excep- 
tion of  "H.  D.,"  can  equal  his  delicate  precision 
of  phrasing.  None  of  them  is  more  subtly  pic- 
torial. Moreover  Mr.  Bodenheim' s  theories  as  to 
the  nature  of  poetry  (for  which  he  has  adroitly  ar- 
gued), such  as  that  it  should  be  a  "coloured  grace" 
and  that  it  should  bear  no  relation  to  "human 
beliefs  and  fundamental  human  feelings,"  might 
seem  even  more  clearly  to  define  that  affinity. 
Yet  it  would  be  a  great  mistake  to  ticket  Mr. 
Bodenheim  as  an  Imagist  merely  because  his 
poetry  is  sharply  pictorial,  or  because  he  has  de- 
clared that  poetry  should  not  deal  with  funda- 
mental human  emotions.  As  a  matter  of  fact  his 
theory  and  performance  are  two  very  different 
things.  One  has  not  gone  very  far  before  detect- 
ing in  him  a  curious  dualism  of  personality. 

It  is  obvious,  of  course,  that  Mr.  Bodenheim  has 
taken  out  of  the  air  much  that  the  Imagists  and 
other  radicals  have  set  in  circulation.  His  poems 
are  in  the  freest  of  free  verse :  they  are  indeed  quite 


MAXWELL    BODENHEIM 

candidly  without  rhyme  or  metrical  rhythm,  and 
resolve  themselves  for  the  most  part  into  series  of 
lucid  and  delicate  statements,  of  which  the  crisp 
cadences  are  only  perhaps  the  cadences  of  a  very 
sensitive  prose.  It  is  to  Mr.  Bodenheim's  credit 
that  despite  the  heavy  handicap  of  such  a  form  he 
makes  poems.  How  does  he  do  this?  Not 
merely  by  evoking  sharp-edged  images — if  he  did 
only  that  he  would  be  indeed  simply  an  exponent 
of  "coloured  grace"  or  Imagism — but  precisely  be- 
cause his  exquisite  pictures  are  not  merely  pictures, 
but  symbols.  And  the  things  they  symbolize  are, 
oddly  enough,  these  flouted  "fundamental  feel- 
ings." 

Mr.  Bodenheim  is,  in  short,  a  symbolist.  His 
poems  are  almost  invariably  presentations  of 
mood,  evanescent  and  tenuous — tenuous,  fre- 
quently, to  the  point  of  impalpability — in  terms  of 
the  visual  or  tactile;  and  if  it  would  be  an  exag- 
geration to  say  that  they  differ  from  the  purely 
imagistic  type  of  poetry  by  being,  for  this  reason, 
essentially  emotional,  nevertheless  such  a  state- 
ment approximates  the  truth.  Perhaps  rather 
one  should  say  that  they  are  the  ghosts  of  emo- 
tions, or  the  perfumes  of  them.  It  is  at  this  point 
that  one  guesses  Mr.  Bodenheim's  dualism.  For 


SCEPTICISMS 

it  seems  as  if  the  poet  were  at  odds  with  the 
theorist:  as  if  the  poet  desired  to  betray  these 
"fundamental  emotions"  to  a  greater  extent  than 
the  severe  theorist  will  permit.  In  consequence 
one  feels  that  Mr.  Bodenheim  has  cheated  not  only 
his  reader  but  also  himself.  He  gives  us  enough 
to  show  us  that  he  is  one  of  the  most  original  of 
contemporary  poets,  but  one  feels  that  out  of  sheer 
perversity  he  has  withheld  even  more  than  he  has 
given.  There  are  many  poets  who  have  the  vox  et 
praeterea  nihil  of  poetry,  and  who  wisely  therefore 
cultivate  that  kind  of  charm;  but  it  is  a  tragedy 
when  a  poet  such  as  Mr.  Bodenheim,  possessing 
other  riches  as  well,  ignores  these  riches  in  credu- 
lous obeisance  to  the  theory  that,  since  it  is  the 
voice,  the  hover,  the  overtone,  the  perfume  alone 
which  is  important  in  poetry,  therefore  poetry  is 
to  be  sought  rather  in  the  gossamer  than  in  the 
rock.  Mr.  Bodenheim  has  taken  the  first  step: 
he  has  found  that  moods  can  be  magically  de- 
scribed— no  less  than  dew  and  roses.  But  poetic 
magic,  as  George  Santayana  has  said,  is  chiefly  a 
matter  of  perspective — it  is  the  revelation  of 
"sweep  in  the  concise  and  depth  in  the  clear" — 
and,  as  Santayana  points  out,  if  this  is  true  we 
need  not  be  surprised  to  perceive  that  the  poet  will 
[236;] 


MAXWELL    BODENHEIM 

find  greatest  scope  for  this  faculty  in  dealing  with 
ideas,  particularly  with  philosophic  ideas.  .  .  . 
And  we  return  to  our  old  friend  the  "cosmic." 

Nor  need  Mr.  Bodenheim  be  unduly  alarmed. 
For  when  one  suggests  that  the  contemplation  of 
life  as  a  whole,  or  the  recognition  of  its  items  as 
merely  minute  sand-grains  of  that  whole,  or  an 
occasional  recollection  of  man's  twinkling  unim- 
portance, or  a  fleeting  glimpse  of  the  cruel  perfec- 
tion of  the  order  of  things,  are  among  the  finest 
headlands  from  which  the  poet  may  seek  an  out- 
look, one  is  certainly  not  suggesting  that  poets 
should  be  logicians.  "It  is  not  the  paraphernalia 
but  the  vision  of  philosophy  which  is  sublime."  If 
the  poet's  business  is  vision,  he  can  ill  afford  to 
ignore  this  watch-tower.  For  if,  like  Mr.  Boden- 
heim, he  desires  that  poetry  shall  be  a  kind  of 
absolute  music,  "unattached  with  surface  senti- 
ment"— a  music  in  which  sensations  are  the  notes, 
emotions  the  harmonies,  and  ideas  the  counter- 
point; a  music  of  detached  waver  and  gleam,  which, 
taking  for  granted  a  complete  knowledge  of  all 
things,  will  not  be  so  nai've  as  to  make  statements, 
or  argue  a  point,  or  praise  the  nature  of  things,  or 
inveigh  against  it,  but  will  simply  employ  all  such 
elements  as  the  keys  to  certain  tones — then  truly 

[237] 


SCEPTICISMS 

the  keyboard  of  the  poet  who  uses  his  brain  as  well 
as  his  sensorium  will  be  immensely  greater  than 
that,  let  us  say,  of  the  ideal  Imagist. 

The  point  has  been  elaborated  because,  as  has 
been  said,  it  is  one  on  which  Mr.  Bodenheim  seems 
to  be  at  odds  with  himself:  the  poems  in  "Minna 
and  Myself"  show  him  to  be  an  adept  at  playing 
with  moods,  an  intrepid  juggler  with  sensations, 
but  one  who  tends  to  repeat  his  tricks,  and  to 
juggle  always  with  the  same  set  of  balls.  Of  the 
poems  themselves  what  more  needs  to  be  said  than 
that  they  are  among  the  most  delicately  tinted  and 
fantastically  subtle  of  contemporary  poems  in  free 
verse?  Mr.  Bodenheim's  sensibility  is  as  unique 
in  its  way  as  that  of  Wallace  Stevens  or  of  T.  S. 
Eliot  or  of  Alfred  Kreymborg.  One  need  not 
search  here  for  the  robust,  nor  for  the  seductively 
rhythmic,  nor  for  the  enkindling.  Mr.  Boden- 
heim's patterns  are  cool  almost  to  the  point  of 
preciosity;  they  are,  so  to  speak,  only  one  degree 
more  fused  than  mosaics.  They  must  be  read 
with  sympathy  or  not  at  all.  And  one  feels  that 
Mr.  Bodenheim  is  only  at  his  beginning,  and  that 
he  will  eventually  free  himself  of  his  conventions 
on  the  score  of  rhythm  (with  which  he  is  experi- 
menting tentatively)  and  of  theme-colour.  In 

C238] 


MAXWELL    BODENHEIM 

what  direction  these  broadenings  will  lead  him, 
only  Mr.  Bodenheim  can  discover.  One  is  con- 
vinced, however,  that  he  can  step  out  with 
security. 


C239] 


XXVI 

Philosophy  for  the  Flute: 
Alfred  Kreymborg 

THE  public,  or  that  iridescent  portion  of  it 
which  occasionally  thinks  of  such  things 
as  poetry,  has  not  found  it  easy  to  make 
up  its  mind  about  Alfred  Kreymborg.  When  his 
first  book,  "Mushrooms,"  appeared — a  book  to 
which  he  appended  the  disarming  sub-title  "A 
Book  of  Free  Forms" — this  iridescent  fraction 
twinkled  for  a  moment  between  indifference  and 
derision :  could  a  man  who  wrote  thus  be  anything 
but  charlatan?  Was  he  serious*?  And  the  oddi- 
ties of  taste  to  which  Mr.  Kreymborg  lent  himself 
in  the  editorship  of  "Others"  were  not  calculated 
to  mitigate  this  impression.  A  good  many  people 
have  from  first  to  last  thought  of  him  as  one  who, 
with  a  view  to  obtaining  any  sort  of  publicity,  has 
courted  the  bizarre  in  art,  the  aesthetically 
brindled,  very  much  as  a  newspaper  editor  might 
court  the  sensational.  Perhaps  there  is  a  trace 
[240;] 


ALFRED   KREYMBORG 

of  truth  in  this.  But  one  must  remember  that 
Mr.  Kreymborg  was  in  the  position  of  an  editor- 
poet,  serious  in  his  intentions,  (even  if  his  inten- 
tions related  largely — as  whose  do  not? — to 
himself)  but  almost  wholly  without  funds.  Some 
sort  of  publicity  was  indispensable.  And  it  was 
only  too  dangerously  easy  for  one  whose  natural 
interest  was  in  the  "new"  in  art  to  heighten  "new- 
ness" for  this  purpose  to  the  point  of  novelty. 

The  result  has  been,  as  in  most  such  cases,  two- 
natured:  it  has  made  Mr.  Kreymborg  tolerably 
well-known,  but  on  the  other  hand  the  reputation 
it  has  bestowed  on  him  is  in  a  sense  a  speckled  one, 
the  colour  of  which  is  questionable.  With  what, 
precisely  of  all  the  hues  ranging  from  lemon- 
yellow  through  saffron  to  earthy  brown,  should 
one  associate  him4?  With  the  gelatinous  ero- 
genous quiverings  of  Mina  Loy,  the  tortuously 
patterned  logic  of  Marianne  Moore,  the  syllable- 
eruptions  with  which  Walter  Arensberg  has  in- 
fected language1?  Or  rather  with  the  gentle  skill 
and  beauty  of  such  poets  as  Wallace  Stevens  and 
Maxwell  Bodenheim?  Mr.  Kreymborg's  two 
small  books,  "Mushrooms"  and  "Plays  for  Poem- 
Mimes"  indicate  clearly  enough  that  it  is  in  the 
latter  class  that,  now  at  any  rate,  he  belongs. 


SCEPTICISMS 

But  they  indicate  also,  perhaps,  that  Mr.  Kreym- 
borg  himself  has  not  always  from  the  outset  been 
too  precisely  aware  of  this  destiny. 

"Mushrooms,"  in  fact,  was  a  book  of  which  ex- 
periment and  uncertainty  were  ruling  motives. 
It  was  something  new  in  poetry  that  Mr.  Kreym- 
borg  desired,  but  of  what  nature  this  should  be 
was  not  quite  clear  to  him.  Rhyme,  one  imagines 
him  saying  to  himself,  can,  and  perhaps  should,  be 
largely  dispensed  with;  stanza-patterns  certainly 
are  not  desirable  where  they  are  not  inevitable; 
one's  personality  should,  in  the  full  sense  of  its 
immediate  moment,  be  free,  and  colloquial;  and 
are  capital  letters  at  the  beginnings  of  lines  any 
longer  necessary?  Into  the  psychological  value 
of  the  latter  custom  one  need  not  go;  nor  need  one 
here  discuss  the  sheer  propulsive  force,  or  value  for 
emphasis,  or  for  beauty  of  sound,  of  rhyme.  One 
is  more  interested  in  Mr.  Kreymborg's  effort  to 
give  full  rein  to  his  personality  and  have  it  none 
the  less,  as  it  were,  pace. 

For  the  fact  is  that  if  we  approach  his  work 
first  from  the  technical  side  we  find  it  to  be  some- 
thing quite  different  from  what  is  commonly  called 
free  verse  or  cadenced  verse.  Mr.  Kreymborg  is 
in  reality  a  melodist,  a  melodist  perhaps  more 
[242] 


ALFREDKREYMBORG 

exactly  in  the  musical  than  in  the  metrical  sense, 
though  the  result  is,  or  should  be,  in  the  upshot, 
the  same.  The  poems  in  Mushrooms  are  con- 
stantly approaching  the  condition  of  having  a 
tune;  and  Mr.  Kreymborg  has  himself  told  us 
that  it  is  often  with  a  definite  musical  tempo  in 
mind — three-four  time  for  example — that  he 
writes  them.  It  is  not  remarkable  therefore  that 
one  feels  more  precision  and  gusto  of  movement  in 
many  of  these  poems  than  one  does  in  most  free 
verse.  What  is  remarkable  is  that  on  the  whole 
one  feels  this  so  seldom,  relatively;  or, — perhaps 
it  would  be  fairer  to  say, — that  one  so  seldom 
feels  it  strongly.  Certain  of  the  shorter  lyrics  fall 
clearly  and  deliciously  enough  into  a  piercing 
Mozartian  pattern,  a  pattern  which  lacks  per- 
ceptibly nothing  through  the  absence  of  rhyme. 
In  such  cases  one  feels  that  the  addition  of  piano 
accompaniment  and  melody  for  the  voice  would 
be  extremely  simple.  This  is  true  also  of  many 
of  the  brief  lyric  movements  in  the  "Plays  for 
Poem-Mimes."  Observe,  for  example,  from 
"Mushrooms"  the  opening  lines  of  "To  Circe" : 

Voice,  voice,  marvellous  voice: 
Come,  come  back  to  me ! 

[2433 


SCEPTICISMS 

Or,  from  the  later  volume,  in  "When  the  Willow 
Nods"  : 

Only  when  the  willow  nods 
does  the  water  nod: 
only  when  the  wind  nods 
does  the  willow  nod ; 
only  when  a  cloud  nods 
does  the  wind  nod ; 
and,  of  course,  nod 
rhymes  with  God.  .  .  . 

In  these  excerpts  the  melody  is  clear  enough.  But 
these  are  the  exception  and  all  too  often  one  looks 
in  vain  for  the  metrical  or  rhythmical  clue.  What 
is  the  difficulty?  Mr.  Kreymborg  is,  as  it  hap- 
pens, exceptionally  sensitive  to  music,  exception- 
ally perceptive  of  its  values.  But  of  this 
sensitiveness  and  perceptiveness  he  carries  over  to 
the  other  art,  the  art  of  word-arrangement,  only 
so  much  of  music  as  relates  to  the  distribution  of 
ictus  and  pause.  This  alone,  unfortunately,  will 
not  wholly  serve.  Ictus  is  lame,  if  not  actually 
functionless  and  vestigial,  if  it  does  not  fall  on 
the  right  syllable,  the  syllable  suited  to  the  occa- 
sion by  its  sound;  and  pause,  if  it  be  distributed 
without  regard  for  the  kindred  pauses  of  idea  and 
orotundity,  is  merely  unobserved.  A  beautiful  or 


ALFRED   KREYMBORG 

rich  or  subtle  movement  in  poetry  derives  about 
equally  from  sound-values  and  rhythm- values :  the 
skilful  poet  knows  how  to  synthesize  them  in  such 
a  way  as  at  one  moment  to  produce  harmony, 
when  they  fall  smoothly  in  unison,  and  at  another 
to  produce  dissonance,  when  they  slightly  clash. 
Mr.  Kreymborg  could  manage  the  rhythmic  part 
of  this  synthesis,  but  his  sense  of  sound  values  is 
deficient.  He  appears  to  be  unaware  of  the  vari- 
ability of  effect  producible  by  syllabic  arrange- 
ment, the  felicitous  alternation  or  repetition  of 
deep  or  shallow  vowels,  dull  or  sharp  consonants, 
or  consonants  richly  sheathed.  In  this  regard  it 
is  interesting  to  contrast  him  with  so  different  a 
poet  as  Mr.  John  Gould  Fletcher,  who  lacks  the 
specifically  metrical  sense  as  conspicuously  as  Mr. 
Kreymborg  possesses  it,  but  who,  on  the  other 
hand,  is  inferior  to  no  poet  living  in  his  use  of  the 
colour  of  sound. 

The  result  of  Mr.  Kreymborg's  deficiency  in  the 
sense  of  sound-values  is  that  his  verse  has  about 
it  always,  whether  the  melodic  movement  is 
marked  or  slight,  grave  or  capricious,  a  kind  of 
thinness,  a  thinness  as  evident  to  the  eye  as  to  the 
ear, — evident  to  the  eye,  perhaps,  as  too  slight  a 
filament  might  be  when  dedicated  to  a  task  too 

[245] 


SCEPTICISMS 

severe,  audible  to  the  ear  as  the  thin  obstructed 
voice  of  a  flute,  a  voice  which  one  might  conceive 
as  being  embodied,  above  the  flute,  in  a  waver  of 
finest  gossamer.  The  medium  is,  it  is  true,  in- 
dividual; one  could  not  mistake  a  poem  by  Mr. 
Kreymborg.  It  has  its  delicate  charm,  whimsical 
or  sharp;  and  it  has  also  its  absurdities,  when  the 
childlike  candour  which  is  the  poet's  favourite 
mood  leads  him  to  extravagances  of  naive  repeti- 
tion. Mr.  Kreymborg  has,  it  is  possible,  been  a 
little  too  much  encouraged  by  admiration  in  this 
regard.  His  charm  for  us  has  been,  always  so 
largely  a  personal  charm,  a  charm  of  the  colloquial 
voice,  of  the  intimate  gesture  seen  through  the 
printed  page,  the  whimsical  shy  defensive  twinkle 
or  grimace,  that  perhaps  it  has  become  difficult  for 
him  not  to  overdo  it.  A  responsive  audience  is 
demoralizing.  If  one  can  so  captivate  with  a 
penny  whistle's  droll  capricious  tendernesses  and 
innuendoes,  why  concern  one's  self  with  an  or- 
chestra"? 

Well,  why  indeed?  ...  It  is  Mr.  Kreymborg 
himself  who  shows  us  why.  The  fact  is  that  he 
is  by  way  of  being  a  philosophical  poet,  one  who  is 
never  completely  happy  unless  he  is  teasing  him- 
self or  his  reader  with  the  insoluble  hieroglyphs  of 

046:1 


ALFRED    KREYMBORG 

the  universe,  hieroglyphs  which  he  employs,  as  an 
artist  should,  half  for  their  own  sake  and  half  for 
their  value  as  sheer  decoration.  But  it  is  curious 
to  observe  how  step  by  step  with  Mr.  Kreymborg's 
development  of  the  philosophical  attitude  has  de- 
veloped with  it  also  one  of  its  important  germinal 
components,  a  component  which  had  its  value  and 
charm  during  the  earlier  phases,  but  which  now 
threatens  to  become  an  incubus.  This  component 
is  Mr.  Kreymborg's  fondness  for  the  attitude  of 
childlike  wonder, — for  the  exclamation  of  round- 
eyed  astonishment,  a  lyricism  a  trifle  too  con- 
sciously sheer;  a  note  which  even  at  the  outset  in 
"Mushrooms,"  for  those  who  do  not  wish  in  poetry 
merely  a  saturated  solution  of  tender  personality, 
manifested  a  disposition  to  become,  whenever  the 
framework  of  thought  was  too  slight,  a  poetic 
paraphrase  of  the  lisp  and  coo.  The  attitude  of 
wonder  is  itself  of  course  impeccable;  one  cannot 
possibly  quarrel  with  anything  so  profoundly  and 
beautifully  human,  or  so  productive,  as  it  has 
been,  of  the  finest  note  in  poetry.  What  one  re- 
sents somewhat  is  Mr.  Kreymborg's  reduction  of  it 
at  times  to  a  sort  of  babblement,  as  if  he  were 
determined  to  hear  the  world  only  when  it  spoke 
to  him  in  monosyllables, — and  not  in  the  primal 


SCEPTICISMS 

and  thundering  monosyllables,  the  superb  mono- 
liths by  which  we  measure  our  bewildered  inse- 
curity, but  in  those  rather  which  suggest  the 
pinafore.  This  one  forgave  in  the  earlier  volume, 
for  there  it  had  about  it  a  pleasant  irresponsibility 
and  gusto;  but  in  the  later  volume,  in  which  Mr. 
Kreymborg  abandons  his  "free  forms"  for  plays 
in  free  verse,  one's  forgiveness  is  not  unmixed. 
For  what  indeed  has  occurred  here  but  that  Mr. 
Kreymborg  has  made  precisely  a  convention  of  this 
attitude  of  childlike  wonder,  and  has,  in  every 
play  here  submitted,  from  tinkling  farce  to 
tinkling  tragedy,  reduced  our  heaven  knows  not 
too  mature  humanity  to  terms  of  mincing  preco- 
cious childhood"?  Let  us  grant  that  once  or  twice 
repeated  this  still  has  its  exquisite  charm,  as  of  a 
tiny  Mozartian  melody  twinkling  from  a  minute 
music-box.  To  this  charm  certainly  one  surren- 
ders in  "Manikin  and  Minikin" :  in  "Lima  Beans" 
and  "Jack's  House,"  however,  one  is  now  and  then 
just  perceptibly  annoyed  by  the  persistent  senti- 
mentality with  which  the  poet  reduces  his 
personae  not  indeed  merely  to  terms  of  childhood 
but  more  exactly  to  terms  of  dollhood :  The  boy 
and  the  girl  regard  each  other  with  eyes  perpetu- 
ally like  saucers,  their  mouths  for  ever  shaped  to 
C248] 


ALFRED  KREYMBORG 
the  "Oo" !  of  puppet  wonder,  their  gestures  un- 
varyingly rectangular  and  affectedly  awkward. 
What,  even  from  Mr.  Kreymborg's  viewpoint,  is 
gained  by  this*?  One  perceives  readily  enough  of 
course  his  wish  to  present  his  personae  "in  a  light," 
in  the  light  of  human  futility  and  its  charming  (or 
ridiculous)  helplessness.  The  puppet,  particu- 
larly in  a  tragic  role,  does  this  to  perfection;  it  is 
an  artifice,  or  indeed  a  mechanism,  admirably 
suited  to  its  purpose.  But  once  done  is  there  any 
use  doing  it  again?  Is  it  wise  of  Mr.  Kreymborg 
to  make  this  one  note  the  burden  of  everything 
he  writes?  The  themes  of  "People  Who  Die," 
it  is  true,  or  "Blue  and  Green,"  are  unalike,  and 
are  played  upon  very  often  with  great  delicacy 
and  precision,  with  a  subtlety  of  conception  which 
has  beauty  and  dignity.  But  here  also  the  heroes 
and  heroines  are  dolls,  studiously  restricting  them- 
selves to  rhythms  and  ideas  which  frequently  sug- 
gest nothing  so  much  as  Mother  Goose.  It  is  high 
time  these  precocious  children  grew  up. 

And  Mr.  Kreymborg  must  surely  be  aware  that 
as  long  as  he  stages  for  us  merely  this  parade  of 
dolls, — no  matter  in  what  lights  or  costumes  or 
charming  quarrels  or  exquisitely  nai've  psychologi- 
cal self-searchings, — these  things  will  be  but  the 

[249] 


SCEPTICISMS 

surface  twinkle,  and  the  basic  idea  will  remain 
"doll."  The  cords  of  a  convention  are  about  him. 
If  Mr.  Kreymborg  wishes  range  and  depth  for  his 
speculations,  variety  for  his  moods,  will  he  not  do 
well  to  abandon  his  whimsical  flute, — not  alto- 
gether, for  it  has  its  beauties  of  clarity  and  liquid 
modulation,  its  droll  breakings  into  the  squeal 
of  falsetto, — and  try  now  and  then  another  in- 
strument'? There  are  limits  after  all  to  what  one 
can  say  with  a  flute.  And  there  is  no  doubt  that 
Mr.  Kreymborg  has  more  to  say. 


[250] 


XXVII 

Amy  Lowell  as  Critic 

MISS  LOWELL'S  book,  'Tendencies  in 
Modern  American  Poetry,"  while  ap- 
parently a  disinterested  survey  of  the 
more  conspicuous  strains  in  contemporary  Amer- 
ican poetry,  is  in  reality  no  more  disinterested 
than  any  other  book  by  a  partis  pris  critic.  It 
is,  essentially,  an  adroit,  though  in  the  pres- 
ent reviewer's  opinion  erroneous,  piece  of  propa- 
ganda. Posing  as  an  impresario,  an  intro- 
ducer of  artists,  Miss  Lowell  is  really  a  Svengali ; 
she  is  determined  to  have  the  art  of  singing  de- 
velop in  her  own  way.  She  perceives,  as  other 
artist-critics  have  perceived  (though  she  may  do 
it  unconsciously),  that  if  her  own  theories  of  work 
are  to  be  validated  by  an  ecumenical  judgment  she 
must  praise  those  theories  when  they  are  practised 
by  others,  judge  them  favourably  in  a  manner 
which  shall  appear  weightily  objective,  and,  in 
every  way  possible,  give  them  the  focus  of  impor- 


SCEPTICISMS 

tance.  Her  right  to  believe  these  theories  the  best 
is  of  course  incontestable.  Her  right  to  give  this 
personal  belief  the  air  of  objective  analysis,  or 
scientific  judgment,  is  only  defensible,  however, 
if  fact  and  reason  support  her.  And  in  this  re- 
spect we  may  question  whether  she  has  not  clearly 
failed. 

This  failure  rests  in  the  framework  itself  of 
Miss  Lowell's  book:  it  is  in  the  framework  of  the 
book  that  she  has  built  up  her  propaganda.  This 
propaganda  is  to  the  effect  that  the  six  poets  here 
discussed  form  so  many  stages  in  an  evolutionary 
order;  and  that  the  most  highly  developed  of  these 
poets,  in  an  evolutionary  sense,  are  the  Imagists — 
H.D.  and  John  Gould  Fletcher.  This,  of  course, 
from  Miss  Lowell's  own  viewpoint  is  so  delightful 
and  so  nourishing  a  conclusion  to  reach  that  it  at 
once  becomes  the  critic's  duty  to  suspect  her  of 
wish- thinking.  Can  she  be  right*?  Let  us  see, 
briefly,  how  Miss  Lowell  does  it.  In  her  first  two 
poets,  Robinson  and  Frost,  Miss  Lowell  finds  a 
•disillusionment  with  the  ideas  of  the  immediate 
past,  a  desire  to  break  away,  half-inhibited,  and  a 
backward  yearning  toward  remembered  beauty  in 
restraint  (this  latter  Miss  Lowell  calls  "atavism," 
a  word  which,  psychologically  speaking,  is  dead; 
[252] 


AMY    LOWELL   AS    CRITIC 

quite  as  mythological  as  a  lamia).  In  the  second 
•pair  of  poets,  Sandburg  and  Masters,  she  en- 
counters so  violent  a  revolt  against  literary  and 
social  tradition  that  the  poets  are  obsessed  with  it 
and  are  prone  to  neglect  beauty  altogether:  they 
destroy,  but  do  not  creatively  replace.  Finally 
in  the  third  pair  of  poets,  Miss  Lowell  finds  a  com- 
plete emancipation  from  all  moral  or  social  issues, 
and  a  complete  devotion  to  the  creation  of  beauty 
in  a  new  way.  Miss  Lowell  is  here  careful  to  dis- 
claim any  belief  that  these  poets  are  necessarily 
any  better  than  the  others ;  they  are  merely,  in  this 
evolutionary  sense,  more  advanced.  .  .  . 

Now,  unfortunately,  it  is  impossible  to  discuss 
accurately  any  sort  of  evolution  except  in  terms  of 
a  single  genus  or  line.  It  is  profitless  (probably) 
to  argue  whether  the  dog  is  evolutionary  in  ad- 
vance of  the  cat,  the  Brazilian  kinkajoo  in  advance 
of  the  Baldwin  apple,  or  the  Jew's-harp  in  advance 
of  the  sonnet.  These  things  are  not  related,  do 
not  evolve  one  from  another.  In  much  the  same 
way,  we  have  various  different  species  of  poet,  and 
it  is  a  falsification  of  the  facts  to  say  that  one  sort 
is  necessarily  in  advance  of  another.  Realists  and 
romanticists  (to  use  terms  which  are  obsolescent 
but  still  meaningful)  develop  in  parallels,  not  in 

O53;] 


SCEPTICISMS 

one  line :  one  sort  of  realism  may  be  newer  or  more 
advanced  than  another  sort  of  realism,  but  its- 
evolution  is  a  thing  apart  from  the  evolution  of 
romanticism.  So,  too,  with  lyric  poets,  and  narra- 
tive poets,  and  dramatic  poets.  They  exist  side 
by  side  contemporaneously,  working  in  different 
directions,  all  of  them  evolving  (if  evolution  must 
be  insisted  on),  but  evolving  in  parallel  lines. 
One  sees  at  once,  therefore,  the  futility  of  en- 
deavouring to  relate  in  any  evolutionary  sense  such 
a  realist  as  Frost  with  such  a  symbolist  as  Fletcher. 
Frost,  in  his  own  genre,  is  quite  as  highly  advanced 
as  Fletcher:  so  is  Masters,  and  so  is  Sandburg. 
They  are  working  in  different  materials,  but  ma- 
terials equally  valid  and  important  and  true  to 
life.  Excursions  in  pure  aesthetics  will  never  re- 
place psycho-realism  (to  coin  a  word),  nor  vice 
versa:  the  two  methods  are  not  competitive,  but 
complementary,  and  capable  of  fusion.  One  may 
prefer  romanticism  in  a  radical  style  to  realism  in 
a  radical  style,  but  neither  can  be  said,  dogmati- 
cally, to  be  higher  in  the  scale  of  evolution  than 
the  other. 

In  this  regard,  therefore,  Miss  Lowell's  book 
wholly  collapses.  So  far  as  truth  is  concerned, 
her  evolutionary  order  might  be  inverted;  if  one 

[2543 


AMY    LOWELL   AS   CRITIC 

excepts  Robinson,  who  in  point  of  poetic  form  is 
less  radical  than  any  of  the  others  .  .  .  Form! 
Of  form,  since  it  is  absolute,  the  evolution  can  be 
discussed — no  matter  by  what  type  of  poet  em- 
ployed. One  wonders,  therefore,  whether  it  was 
not  the  question  of  form  which,  in  a  vague  way, 
Miss  Lowell  had  in  mind  when  she  determined  on 
an  evolutionary  treatment  of  these  so  dissimilar 
poets.  Certainly,  on  that  basis,  she  could  have 
made  out  a  better  case  for  the  order  in  which  she 
had  decided  to  arrange  them. 

As  for  the  bulk  of  Miss  Lowell's  book,  aside 
from  the  matter  of  evolution,  one  reads  it  with 
mixed  sensations.  These  essays  were  originally 
lectures,  and  they  still  smack  of  the  women's  club 
platform.  They  are  colloquial,  occasionally  care- 
less, alternately  patronizing,  popular  and  esoteric. 
Coming  from  a  poet  who  has  to  her  credit  so  much 
verse  of  distinction  it  takes  one  a  little  aback  to 
find  here  a  prose  which,  as  concerns  style,  is  so 
undistinguished,  even  amateurish,  and,  as  concerns 
matter,  so  often  redundant,  inaccurate,  incon- 
sistent and  inept.  One  is  grateful  for  what  Miss 
Lowell  gives  us  of  the  poets'  biographies;  one  is 
grateful,  too,  for  many  bits  of  shrewd  perception. 
The  papers  on  H.D.  and  Fletcher  particularly 


SCEPTICISMS 

are,  despite  bad  arrangement,  interesting  and  now 
and  then  illuminating.  But  the  discussions  of 
Robinson  and  Frost,  of  Masters  and  Sandburg, 
while  often  eulogistic,  really  tell  us  nothing  new 
and  have  that  incompleteness  which  indicates,  on 
the  critic's  part,  a  temperamental  failure  in  rap- 
prochement. Miss  Lowell  sees  life  differently 
from  Mr.  Masters  (as  is  natural),  and  in  conse- 
quence she  cannot  help  thinking  that  Spoon  River 
would  have  been  truer  to  life  if  it  had  been  a 
hagiology.  She  sees  life  differently  from  Mr. 
Sandburg  and  writes  many  pages  in  an  effort  to 
prove  that  millionaires  are  often  quite  human  and 
anarchists  quite  vulgar.  Of  Mr.  Frost's  preoccu- 
pation with  the  attempt  to  write  verse  which  shall 
have  the  simplicity  of  conversational  speech  and 
its  modulations  she  says  nothing;  instead  she  ex- 
claims at  his  failure  to  employ  dialect  in  his  New 
England  poems — a  failure  for  which  we  can 
wisely  be  grateful. 

Taken  all  together,  in  conjunction  with  the 
fundamental  falsity  of  her  evolutionary  scheme, 
these  things  compel  one  to  conclude  that  a  certain 
intellectual  unripeness  and  sketchiness,  a  proneness 
to  hasty  and  self-satisfying  conclusions  without 
careful  or  accurate  survey  of  the  facts,  make  of 

[256: 


AMY    LOWELL   AS    CRITIC 

Miss  Lowell  an  amateur  rather  than  a  serious 
critic.  She  is  engaging,  clever,  an  industrious 
assimilator  of  current  ideas,  and  to  some  degree 
she  sifts  among  them  the  bad  from  the  good;  but 
the  instant  she  enters  the  psychological  or  philo- 
sophical or  reflective  spheres  she  proves  herself  a 
child,  swayed  very  largely  by  her  emotions  and 
desires.  She  desires  to  think  that  Aldington  never 
wrote  a  metrical  line,  and  so,  without  looking  to 
see,  she  thinks  so  and  says  so;  and  she  is  wrong. 
She  desires  to  think  that  the  imagist  method  is  the 
last  word  in  poetry,  and  evolves  her  scheme  of 
evolution.  Miss  Lowell  rebukes  Mr.  Sandburg 
for  admitting  social  propaganda  into  his  poetry. 
She  would  do  well  to  remember  that  propaganda 
in  literary  criticism  is  just  as  dangerous  if  the  too- 
eager  critic  ignores  or  distorts  the  facts.  When 
the  scientific  method  is  used  to  demonstrate  any- 
thing but  the  truth,  it  invariably  proves  a  boome- 
rang. 


XXVIII 

The  Ivory  Tower:  Louis 
Untermeyer  as  Critic 

THE  critic  of  poetry  who  is  also  a  poet  is 
apt  to  be  the  most  interesting  and  the 
most  unreliable  of  critics.  He  is  interest- 
ing, because  his  contact  with  contemporary  poetry 
is  intimate  and  emotional  rather  than,  as  in  the 
case  of  the  somewhat  hypothetical  judicial  critic, 
merely  speculative  and  coolly  selective.  He  is 
vitally  concerned  with  the  success  or  failure  of 
this  or  that  particular  strain  of  work.  This  makes 
for  warmth  in  his  criticism,  and  for  that  sort  of 
intensity  of  perception  which  an  enthusiasm  will 
focus  on  a  small  area.  But  it  makes,  also,  for 
unreliability  as  concerns  matters  which  lie  outside 
of  that  focus.  This  unreliability  will  be  dimin- 
ished, of  course,  in  the  degree  in  which  the  critic 
is  aware  of  his  bias  and  makes  allowance  for  it. 
Even  so,  it  cannot  be  removed. 

Mr.  Untermeyer,  who  has  now  co-ordinated  in 


LOUIS    UNTERMEYER 

a  book  his  reviews  of  contemporary  poetry,  is  a 
pretty  good  specimen  of  this  kind  of  critic;  and  it 
seems  appropriate  that  his  book  should  be  examined 
by  one  of  his  own  species,  and,  in  particular,  by 
one  who  for  the  most  part  has  opposed  and  been 
opposed  by  Mr.  Untermeyer  at  every  turn.  Mr. 
Untermeyer  and  his  reviewer  share,  of  course,  cer- 
tain likes  and  dislikes :  their  respective  circles  have, 
as  would  be  inevitable,  a  considerable  area  in 
common.  But  in  the  main  they  reflect  tendencies 
which  are  antagonistic,  and  it  would  perhaps  be 
in  the  interests  of  poetic  justice  that  these  should 
be  frankly  confessed. 

Mr.  Untermeyer's  evolution  has  been  interest- 
ing. Leaving  out  of  account  his  parodies,  his  first 
books  were  a  volume  of  sentimental  and  tradi- 
tional love  poems  and  a  volume  of  lyrics  having 
the  title  "Challenge"  and  pretty  well  infused  with 
the  doctrine,  popular  a  few  years  ago,  of  the  "red 
blood"  school.  Both  books  revealed  Mr.  Unter- 
meyer as  essentially  a  conservative  poet;  one  who 
did  not  by  nature  love  to  experiment;  one  who, 
indeed,  felt  no  compulsion  toward  any  kind  of 
artistic  innovation,  for  the  patent  reason  that  he 
had  nothing  particularly  new  or  intransigeantly 
individual  to  say.  Any  traces  of  radicalism  he 


SCEPTICISMS 

possessed  were  either  in  the  shape  of  this  "red- 
blooded  Americanism,"  a  sort  of  localized  "I  am 
the  master  of  my  fate;"  or  in  the  shape  of  social 
radicalism,  a  desire  for  a  more  democratic,  or  shall 
I  say,  more  socialistic,  kind  of  democracy.  The 
chances  are  that  if  he  had  been  left  undisturbed 
Mr.  Untermeyer  would  have  continued  to  write, 
proficiently  and  lustily  enough,  on  these  themes. 
.  .  .  But  Mr.  Untermeyer,  like  many  another 
conservative  poet,  was  not  to  be  left  undisturbed. 
It  was  his  misfortune  that  there  were  radicals 
maturing;  and  beginning  about  1911  these  revolu- 
tionaries began  throwing  their  bombs  into  the 
aesthetic  arena  with  deadly  effect.  The  world  of 
letters  was  destined  for  rapid  changes.  Masefield 
and  Gibson  first  appeared,  then  the  Georgians, 
then  our  realists  Masters  and  Frost,  then  the 
Imagists,  and  Amy  Lowell,  and  Sandburg;  and 
finally  the  nomadic  and  unprincipled  tribe  of 
"Others." 

It  is  to  Mr.  Untermeyer's  credit  that  in  this 
pandemonium,  so  distressingly  not  of  his  own 
choosing,  he  managed  to  keep  his  feet.  He  was 
sturdy  and  intelligent;  and  if  he  could  not  pre- 
cisely hope  to  lead  this  somewhat  capriciously 
enthusiastic  mob,  he  at  any  rate  succeeded  in  fol- 


LOUIS    UNTERMEYER 

lowing  it,  with  considerable  discernment,  and  at 
no  great  distance.  .  .  .  The  successes  of  these 
radicals,  however,  left  him  in  an  uncomfortable 
position.  Oddly  enough,  Mr.  Untermeyer  had 
conceived  himself  to  be  somewhat  radical — he 
had,  I  dare  say,  seen  himself,  (which  of  us  has 
not*?)  as  an  intrepid  explorer  of  dark  continents; 
and  it  nonplussed  him  a  little  to  find  his  radicalism 
all  of  a  sudden  so  nakedly  vieux  jeu.  But  he 
lacked  neither  courage  nor  adaptability.  It  was 
not  long  before  he  had  begun,  as  a  poet,  to  bring 
himself  up  to  date,  to  vary  the  length  of  his  lines 
a  bit,  and,  as  a  critic,  to  fight  vigorously  and  keenly 
for  ideals  wisely,  though  perhaps  a  little  grudg- 
ingly, modified.  The  first  horrible  chaos  cleared 
up  quickly  enough ;  and  Mr.  Untermeyer  was  soon 
in  possession  of  a  consistent  and  well-edged  policy. 
This  policy  he  now  puts  before  us  in  his  survey 
of  contemporary  American  poetry.  It  is,  as  we 
should  expect,  an  elaboration  and  broadening  of 
the  principles  underlying  his  own  two  early  books ; 
his  chief  tenets  are  Americanism,  lustihood,  glorifi- 
cation of  reality  (facing  of  the  world  of  fact) 
democracy  (a  word  which  few  of  his  pages  lack) 
and,  of  course,  the  postponed,  though  not  to  be 
omitted,  inevitable  beauty.  These  tenets  he 

[2613 


SCEPTICISMS 

works  hard,  particularly  those  of  Americanism, 
lustihood  and  democracy.  These  are,  indeed,  his 
touchstones.  It  is  "Americanism"  he  sees,  above 
all,  in  Masters,  Frost,  Robinson,  even  Amy 
Lowell;  it  is  "democracy"  he  sees  above  all,  in 
Giovannitti,  Wood,  Oppenheim,  Sandburg,  Brody, 
Lola  Ridge;  and  it  is  chiefly  for  their  manifesta- 
tion of  these  qualities  that,  apparently,  Mr.  Unter- 
meyer  accords  these  poets  the  place  of  honour  in 
his  book,  and,  ipso  facto,  the  place  of  honour  in 
contemporary  poetry.  Poetry,  according  to  Mr. 
Untermeyer  "is  expressing  itself  once  more  in  the 
terms  of  democracy.  This  democracy  is  two-fold : 
a  democracy  of  the  spirit  and  a  democracy  of 
speech.  This  is  the  unifying  quality  that  con- 
nects practically  all  of  the  poets  with  whom  I  pro- 
pose to  deal;  it  intensifies  what  is  their  inherent 
Americanism;  and  it  charges  their  varied  art  with 
a  native  significance.  .  .  ."  Art,  our  critic  goes 
on  to  say,  is  a  community  expression :  away,  there- 
fore, with  the  pernicious  doctrine  of  "art  for  art's 
sake" ;  and  down  with  the  ivory  tower.  Art  has  a 
human  function  to  perform.  It  has  no  right  to 
cloister  itself,  to  preoccupy  itself  solely  with 
beauty. 

Well,  these  ideas  are  appealing,  they  have  their 


LOUIS    UNTERMEYER 

precise  value.  Let  us  grant  in  particular  the 
Tightness,  and  indeed  the  commonplace  inevita- 
bility, of  the  fact  that  periodically  a  literature  will 
renew  itself  by  a  descent  into  the  Bethesda  well 
of  demotic  speech.  We  may  go  even  further,  and 
say  that  from  the  sociological  viewpoint  nothing 
can  be  more  interesting  than  the  reflection  of  social 
changes  and  social  hungers  in  literature.  But, 
here,  I  think,  we  must  pause.  The  implications 
become  a  trifle  ominous.  Are  we  to  conclude  from 
these  premises  that  art  is  any  the  less  art  because 
it  fails  to  satisfy  a  contemporary  hunger  for  this 
or  that  social  change"?  Are  we  to  conclude  that 
art  is  any  the  more  richly  art  because  it  bears 
conspicuously  and  consciously  the  label  "Made  in 
America'"?  Is  Poe  to  be  judged,  as  an  artist,  in- 
ferior to  Whitman  because  he  is  less  nationalistic 
or  less  preoccupied  with  social  consciousness1?  Or, 
indeed, — since  Mr.  Untermeyer  really  raises  the 
question, — is  such  an  art  as  Foe's,  which  as  well 
as  any  illustrates  the  virtues  and  defects  of  the 
theory  of  art  for  art's  sake,  a  whit  the  less  a  form 
of  community  expression,  a  whit  the  less  satisfying 
to  the  human  hunger  for  articulation,  than  such 
an  art  as  Mr.  Untermeyer  seems  to  favour4? 
These  questions,  it  seems  to  me,  can  intelli- 

[263] 


SCEPTICISMS 

gently  be  answered  only  in  the  negative.  It  is  at 
this  point  that  the  line  of  cleavage  between  the 
tendencies  for  which  Mr.  Untermeyer  stands  and 
those  for  which  his  reviewer  stands  become  most 
sharply  apparent.  For  Mr.  Untermeyer's  book 
answers  all  these  questions,  my  implication,  in  the 
affirmative.  I  do  not  mean  that  he  dispenses  with 
the  aesthetic  approach  altogether  in  his  appraisal 
of  contemporary  poets:  his  aesthetic  approach  I 
shall  come  to  later.  But  I  do  mean  that  Mr.  Un- 
termeyer allows  nationalistic  and  sociological  con- 
siderations to  play  an  equal  part  with  the  aesthetic. 
To  put  it  curtly,  he  likes  poetry  with  a  message,— 
poetry  which  is  politically,  from  his  viewpoint,  on 
the  right  side.  Surely  he  must  perceive  the  short- 
sightedness and  essential  viciousness  of  this?  So- 
cial ideas  are  local  and  temporary:  they  change 
like  the  fashions,  the  materials  with  which  they 
deal  are  always  in  flux,  and  the  odds  are  great  that 
what  is  a  burning  issue  today  will  be  a  familiar 
fact,  and  the  occasion  of  a  yawn,  tomorrow. 
These  are,  from  the  standpoint  of  the  artist,  mere 
superficialities :  if  they  are  to  be  touched  they  must 
be  touched  lightly,  tangentially  grazed.  It  is  not 
to  the  political  odes  of  Wordsworth,  Coleridge, 
Swinburne,  that  we  most  joyously  turn  in  reread- 
[264] 


LOUIS    UNTERMEYER 

ing  those  poets.  And  the  social  problems  of  Shel- 
ley's "Revolt  of  Islam"  merely  excite  our  curiosity. 
Here,  then,  lies  the  great  fault  of  Mr.  Unter- 
meyer's  book.  This  bias  has  harmfully  deflected  it 
from  the  very  outset,  it  has  cast  into  undue  promi- 
nence the  work  of  Oppenheim,  Giovannitti, 
Charles  Erskine  Scott  Wood,  Alter  Brody;  it  has 
put  a  wrong  emphasis  on  the  work  of  Sandburg; 
and,  per  contra,  it  has  thrown  into  a  shadow  by  no 
means  deserved  the  work  of  such  poets  as  do  not,  in 
Mr.  Untermeyer's  opinion,  fulfil  their  social  con- 
tracts,— such  poets  as  T.  S.  Eliot,  John  Gould 
Fletcher,  Wallace  Stevens,  Maxwell  Bodenheim, 
the  Imagists,  and  the  entire  strain  in  poetry  for 
which  they  inconspicuously  stand,  the  strain  which 
we  indicate  when  we  use  the  phrase  "art  for  art's 
sake."  The  work  of  the  latter  poets  is  not,  in 
bulk,  great :  their  positions  are  not,  as  concerns  rep- 
utation, secure.  Yet  I  think  there  can  be  no  ques- 
tion that  all  of  them  have  given  us  poems  which, 
judged  as  works  of  art,  are  clearly  finer,  and  more 
universal  in  appeal,  than  anything  as  yet  given  us 
by  Oppenheim,  Giovannitti,  Wood,  or  Brody. 
The  latter  four  are,  in  fact — with  all  due  allow- 
ance made  for  their  vitality,  sincerity,  and  fre- 
quent skill — simply,  viewed  as  artists,  mediocre. 

[265] 


SCEPTICISMS 

Mere  energy  will  not  save  them.  It  is  indeed 
open  to  question  whether  they  do  not  deserve  the 
same  indictment  as  thinkers;  as  deliverers  of  the 
"message."  And  to  honour  them  as  copiously  as 
Mr.  Untermeyer  honours  them  is  in  a  measure  to 
derogate  from  the  true  value  of  those  among  whom 
they  are  placed — Frost,  Masters,  Amy  Lowell, 
and  Robinson. 

But  this  sociological  and  nationalistic  bias, 
while  it  is  the  prime  factor  in  Mr.  Untermeyer's 
error,  is  not  the  only  one.  It  will  not  completely 
diagnose  Mr.  Untermeyer's  case;  it  will  not  alone 
explain  his  too  enthusiastic  preferences,  his  too 
acrimonious  antipathies.  Let  us  revert  for  a  mo- 
ment to  his  love  of  the  art  that  bears  a  message. 
This  hunger  carries  with  it  in  Mr.  Untermeyer's 
mind  homologous  hungers  in  the  spheres  of  meta- 
physics and  aesthetics,  hungers  which  reveal  them- 
selves as  clearly  in  his  poetry  as  in  his  criticism. 
His  interests  are,  in  short, — as  was  indicated  ear- 
lier,— primitively  naive;  he  is  oratorically  assert- 
ive, a  trifle  consciously  robust;  and  quite  aside, 
therefore,  from  questions  of  social  ethics,  his  predi- 
lections in  poetry  are  for  the  unflinchingly  mas- 
culine, the  explicitly  affirmative  (what  Nietzsche 
termed  the  "yea-saying"),  the  triumphantly  and 

[266] 


LOUIS    UNTERMEYER 

not  too  reflectively  acceptant;  the  vigorous,  in 
short,  rather  than  the  cerebral  or  oblique  or  disil- 
lusioned, the  enthusiastic  and  downright  or  sanely 
sentimental  rather  than  the  interpretative  or  an- 
alytic or  psychologically  tenuous. 

And  here  we  come  upon  the  matter  of  Mr. 
Untermeyer's  aesthetic  equipment,  and  pitch  at 
once,  flatly,  upon  his  very  serious  limitations. 
Within  these  limitations  Mr.  Untermeyer  has,  if 
we  recall  his  two  first  volumes  of  verse,  grown  re- 
markably; he  has  extended  his  sympathies  further 
than  one  might  have  hoped.  But,  at  the  critical 
point,  they  fail.  Beyond  the  delicately  overtoned 
lyrics  of  de  la  Mare,  unconventionally  conven- 
tional in  form,  relatively  simple  in  range,  or,  on 
the  other  hand,  beyond  the  matter-of-fact  incisive 
satires  of  Spoon  River,  or  the  slightly  too  smoothly 
turned  etchings  of  Robinson,  they  cannot  reach. 
And,  unfortunately  for  Mr.  Untermeyer,  it  is  pre- 
cisely in  these  two  directions  that  the  fruit-work  is 
being  done.  In  the  former  direction  it  gives  us 
the  work  of  H.D.,  of  Pound  (at  his  best),  of 
Fletcher,  of  Stevens,  of  Bodenheim;  in  the  latter, 
that  of  Eliot,  Kreymborg,  Masters,  (his  later  vein), 
and,  tentatively,  that  of  various  contributors  to 
Others.  What  these  two  groups  have  in  common 
[267] 


SCEPTICISMS 

is  the  fact  that  they  are  both  after  a  kind  of  abso- 
lute poetry — a  poetry  which  delivers  no  message, 
is  imbued  with  no  doctrine,  a  poetry  which  exists 
only  for  the  sake  of  magic, — magic  of  beauty  on 
the  one  hand,  magic  of  reality  on  the  other,  but 
both  struck  at  rather  through  a  play  of  implication 
than  through  matter-of-fact  statement.  This  sort 
of  poetry  is  of  course  unmoral  and  unsociological. 
It  is  not  idolatrous:  the  circumstances,  the  emo- 
tions, out  of  which  it  springs,  are  its  instruments, 
merely,  the  musical  strings  on  which  it  strikes, 
not  the  items  in  a  conscious  ritual.  It  is  the  be-all 
and  end-all  of  such  poetry  that  it  should  be  a  per- 
fectly formed  and  felt  work  of  art :  and  the  greater 
the  elaboration  and  subtlety  consistent  with  such 
perfection  the  more  inexhaustible  will  it  be,  the 
longer  it  will  endure.  Unhappily  for  us  and  for 
Mr.  Untermeyer,  this  type  of  poetry  merely  ex- 
cites his  animosity.  When  it  is  in  the  Fletcher- 
Bodenheim-Stevens  vein  he  grants  its  skilful  use 
of  word-colour,  but  is  distressed  by  its  apparent 
emptiness;  when  it  is  in  the  El iot-Kreymborg- Wil- 
liams vein  he  is  annoyed  by  its  tenuousness,  baffled 
by  its  elusive  use  of  introspection;  and  he  takes 
refuge  in  terming  it  decadent,  or  effeminate,  or 
morbid.  It  is  not  sufficiently  affirmative  for  Mr. 


LOUIS    UNTERMEYER 

Untermeyer :  it  does  not  obviously  enough  encour- 
age him  to  believe  in  God,  or  in  the  divinity  of 
man,  or  in  the  Tightness  of  democracy,  or  in  the 
beauty  and  immortality  of  life.  Mr.  Untermeyer 
suspects  it  of  a  kind  of  negativism.  It  is  not  frank 
with  him,  will  not  state  its  text  with  sufficient  can- 
dour. Moreover  one  suspects  in  Mr.  Untermeyer's 
reiterated  denials  of  anything  "new"  in  such  work, 
as  well  as  in  his  use  of  such  phrases  as  "self-adu- 
latory radicalism"  the  survival  of  some  injury  to  a 
now  hopelessly  overborne  belief  that  he  is  a  radi- 
cal himself. 

It  is,  in  other  words,  precisely  the  finer  note  in 
contemporary  poetry  which  Mr.  Untermeyer  most 
completely  misses.  For  two-thirds  of  the  gamut 
his  perceptions  are,  if  not  subtle,  at  any  rate  sound. 
His  discussions  of  Frost,  Robinson,  Amy  Lowell, 
Masters,  are  adequate,  sometimes  penetrating; 
though  it  would  be  a  mistake  to  call  them  pro- 
found or  to  imply  that  Mr.  Untermeyer  deals 
more  than  superficially  with  the  many  aesthetic 
problems  they  raise.  He  says  good  things  too, 
of  Lindsay  and  Sandburg,  even  of  Fletcher,  Boden- 
heim  and  Kreymborg.  But  the  conditions  are 
adverse.  He  has  not  succeeded  in  detaching  him- 
self sufficiently  from  the  here  and  now;  and  in 
[269] 


SCEPTICISMS 

consequence  his  examination  of  contemporary 
poetry,  though  ably  written  for  the  most  part,  is 
not  wisely  proportioned,  nor  intelligently  discrim- 
inative, and  it  is  subject,  therefore,  to  rather  sav- 
age revisals  at  the  hands  of  time.  Twenty  years 
from  now  will  these  eulogistic  chapters  on  Wood, 
Giovannitti,  Wheelock,  Brody,  look  perhaps  a 
trifle  odd  by  comparison  with  the  cavalier  and  ex- 
tremely incidental  treatment  accorded  to  such 
poets  as  Fletcher  or  Eliot? 

If  so,  I  think  we  have  laid  bare  the  reasons. 
Art  is  art, — not  sociology,  not  philosophy.  It 
may  well  use  these  things  (and  it  may  well  be  the 
richer  for  using  them)  but  it  cannot  serve  them. 
The  best  art  is  seldom  doctrinaire;  and  when  it  is, 
the  doctrine  soon  becomes  the  least  vital  element 
in  it,  important,  perhaps,  only  for  having  supplied 
the  initial  impulse.  And,  moreover,  art  grows. 
It  thrusts  forward  tentacles  in  new  directions,  de- 
velops new  sensibilities.  It  is  forever  extending 
the  sphere  of  man's  consciousness.  And  it  will  do 
no  good  for  the  critic  to  deny  this,  or  to  call  such 
advances  meaningless. 

It  remains  to  say  that  in  a  sense  Mr.  Unter- 
meyer's  book  is  one  for  which  we  have  been  wait- 
ing: it  is  the  only  comprehensive  survey  we  have 
[270] 


LOUIS    UNTERMEYER 

had;  it  covers  the  ground  thoroughly;  it  is  always 
entertaining,  frequently  informative.  The  only 
regret  of  the  present  reviewer  (who,  it  must  be  re- 
membered, is  as  parti  pris  in  one  direction  as  Mr. 
Untermeyer  in  another)  is  that  so  able  a  writer 
should  be  guided  by  principles  so  specious  and 
biasses  so  obvious ;  should  so  seldom  get  down,  as  it 
were,  to  aesthetic  fundamentals ;  so  seldom  analyse 
aesthetically  our  successes  and  failures;  and  so 
largely  limit  himself  to  the  pungently  descriptive, 
to  a  consideration,  merely,  of  the  more  superficial 
aspects  of  contemporary  poetry.  .  .  .  To  which 
of  course  the  answer  is,  curtly,  "de  gustibus." 


XXIX 

Magic  or  Legerdemain? 

IN  every  generation  there  are  artists,  men 
whose  intentions  are  clearly  enough  honest, 
who  tell  us  that  in  the  act  of  artistic  creation 
there  is  nothing  mysterious  or  uncontrollable  and 
that  art  is  solely  an  affair  of  technique  employed 
with  a  maximum  of  skill  in  accordance  with  aes- 
thetic laws.  At  the  beginning  of  a  preceding 
chapter,  that  on  the  "Mechanism  of  Poetic  In- 
spiration," I  myself  made  statements  which  in  this 
connection  may,  to  some,  appear  confusing :  I  com- 
mented with  some  acerbity  on  the  all  too  prevalent 
notion  of  critics  and  poets  to  the  effect  that  there 
is  something  "mysterious"  or  "translunar"  about 
poetic  inspiration,  something  "which  altogether 
escapes  human  analysis."  These  statements  have 
indeed  already  proved  misleading.  I  have  even, 
as  a  result  of  them,  been  accused  of  maintaining, 
as  Poe  did,  that  a  poem  is  a  mathematically  cal- 
culable product,  a  thing  which  can  be  constructed 
[272] 


MAGIC    OR    LEGERDEMAIN? 

bit  by  bit,  synthesized  under  the  microscope  in 
clearest  view.  That  however  is  a  theory  which  I 
have  had  no  intention  of  maintaining.  I  main- 
tain only  that  the  finished  product  can  and  will 
profitably  be  submitted  to  analysis.  The  chemi- 
cal contents  of  a  substance  may  be  fully  known, 
and  the  scientist  may  none  the  less  be  unable  to 
produce  the  same  thing  synthetically.  A  poem 
may  be  exhaustively  analysed,  and  its  constituent 
motives  noted  on  a  relatively  fine  scale,  and,  for 
that  matter,  it  should  be  so  analysed;  but  that  with 
the  knowledge  thus  acquired  any  individual  could 
proceed  to  write  a  Kubla  Khan  or  a  Divine  Com- 
edy is — let  us  say — open  to  question. 

For  even  if  we  agree  in  this  regard  with  the  fun- 
damental (though  not  with  some  of  the  derived) 
principles  of  Freud  and  Kostyleff,  and  even 
though  one  therefore  holds  that  the  functional  val- 
ues of  the  arts  in  the  life  of  man  will  be  pre- 
cisely understood,  and  defined  (perhaps  danger- 
ously?), and  the  propulsive  springs  of  the  indi- 
vidual work  of  art  with  some  clarity  perceived; 
one  does  not  on  that  account  necessarily  believe 
that  the  poet,  who  gives  us  a  poem  in  which  there 
is  however  small  a  grain  of  that  sort  of  beauty 
which  we  call  "magic,"  knows  at  every  step  in  the 

t>733 


SCEPTICISMS 

course  of  composition  precisely  what  he  is  doing. 
Quite,  in  fact,  the  contrary.  I  do  not  think  I  have 
ever  believed  or  maintained  anything  but  that  it  is 
usually  during  a  poet's  best  moments  that  his  me- 
dium is  least  consciously  under  his  control.  There 
are,  I  know,  poets  who  argue,  with  their  own  cases 
in  mind,  that  they  know  at  every  instant  just  what 
effect  they  wish  to  obtain  and  how  to  obtain  it. 
One  is  permitted  to  doubt  this  statement,  and  to 
discredit  it  is  not  difficult.  The  most  obvious 
answer  is  simply  that  it  is  nearly  always  the  poet 
without  "magic,"  the  poet  who  does  precisely  con- 
trol his  medium  at  all  moments,  and  who  for  that 
reason  gives  us  a  poetry  of  close  approximations 
rather  than  of  glittering  achievement,  who,  natur- 
ally enough,  denies  the  efficacy  of  the  subconscious. 
But  that  retort  is  a  trifle  too  recriminatory  and 
easy.  It  is  more  profitable  to  assume  for  the  sake 
of  argument  that  such  poets  do,  actually,  strew 
their  verses  with  the  jewels  for  which  we  fool- 
ishly hunger,  and,  having  made  that  assumption, 
to  ask  them  whether  after  all  they  are  so  sure  that 
the  strewing  of  them  was  foreseen,  calculated,  and 
accomplished  with  conscious  precision  ...  or 
whether,  for  that  matter,  they  know  any  too  well 
how  their  jewels  were  originally  come  by.' 

1:274:1 


MAGIC    OR    LEGERDEMAIN? 

The  affair  is  really  one  of  misunderstanding;  to 
throw  any  light  upon  it,  however  feebly,  com- 
pels us  to  shift  our  ground,  and  to  inquire  a  little 
into  the  state  of  mind  of  the  poet  during  actual 
composition  and  the  preliminary  soundings  which 
precede  it.  There  is,  I  suppose,  no  state  of  mind 
which  to  the  poet  is  more  exquisite,  or  which  he 
would  find  harder  to  describe.  It  might  by  some 
be  denned  as  merely  a  heightening  of  ordinary 
consciousness:  but  while  that  is  perhaps  partially 
true,  it  would  be  more  completely  true  to  say  that 
it  is  a  sort  of  dual  consciousness,  heightened  no 
doubt  on  its  ordinary  plane,  but  conspicuously  dif- 
ferent from  the  usual  state  of  mind  in  that  the 
many  passages  which  lead  downward  to  the  sub- 
conscious are  thrown  open,  and  the  communica- 
tions between  the  two  planes,  upper  and  lower, 
are  free  and  full.  The  process  by  which  this  dual- 
ism is  achieved  may  or  may  not  be  deliberate.  It 
may  be  achieved  by  an  effort,  by  the  premeditated 
touching  off,  as  it  were,  of  an  idea  which,  one 
knows,  will  explode  downward  with  ramifying 
fires  through  the  mine-chambers  upon  which  by  as- 
sociation one  desires  to  draw,  or,  quite  as  often,  the 
initial  explosion  may  be  accidental,  the  starting  of 
the  train  of  fire  by  the  merest  chance  of  phrase  en- 


SCEPTICISMS 

countered  or  itself  tossed  up  from  the  subconscious 
in  response  to  some  pressure  from  the  world  of 
sense.  During  this  state  of  dual  consciousness 
there  is  a  sense  in  which  it  is  true  that  the  poet  has 
his  subconscious  under  control.  Even  when  work- 
ing at  most  rapid  intensity,  he  is  sagacious  of  his 
quarry,  and  although,  if  at  any  moment  inter- 
rupted with  the  question — "What  is  it  that  you 
pursue  with  such  delight — what  is  it  that  you  hope 
to  obtain  by  rejecting  that  word  and  taking  this, 
what  superiority  is  there  in  this  rhythm  to  that1?" 
— he  might  be  totally  at  a  loss  for  his  answer,  none 
the  less  he  feels  in  the  most  intangible  of  ways 
that  he  knows  to  the  minutest  detail  the  value  of 
the  impalpabilities  with  which  he  is  at  battle.  He 
is  diversely  and  brilliantly  conscious  of  all  this, 
but  conscious  only  in  a  peculiar  way:  he  is  aware 
of  more  than  he  precisely  sees.  His  decisions 
themselves  are  largely  conscious,  but  the  logical 
train  by  which  he  reaches  any  such  decision  has 
undergone  such  a  synhaeresis  as  to  have  been  to  all 
intents  obliterated.  Regarding  his  decision  at 
such-and-such  a  point  to  break,  for  example  his 
regular  mode  of  rhythm  and  to  introduce  an  inter- 
lude which  shall  act  as  a  voice  antiphonally  heard, 
he  can  hardly  be  said  to  have  foreseen  in  advance 


MAGIC    OR    LEGERDEMAIN? 

its  effectiveness  or,  for  that  matter,  even  its  exist- 
ence. He  has,  let  us  say,  just  finished  the  last  line 
of  the  preceding  movement.  It  is  quite  open  to 
him  to  proceed  to  a  second  movement  growing  log- 
ically and  persuasively  out  of  the  first.  But  per- 
haps, for  some  unglimpsed  reason,  some  twinkling 
signal  from  the  depths  of  the  subconscious  which 
he  searches  with  heaven  knows  what  intensity,  he 
is  unsatisfied  with  this,  he  desires  something  else, 
it  is  something  else  which  is  needed  if  his  hunger  is 
to  be  appeased.  What  is  this?  And  how  shall 
he  find  it?  Not,  surely,  by  a  reference  to  the 
many  and  so  ludicrously  simple  rules  he  knows, 
nor  even  to  the  filed  items  of  experience,  which  are 
useful  but  incomplete:  at  such  a  moment  his 
salvation  is  only  in  an  adamantine  command  to  the 
whole  conscious  realm  of  his  mind  to  be  silent, 
and  at  once  his  entire  attitude  is  that  of  one  who 
listens.  For  his  dissatisfaction  with  the  fair 
enough  coin  tendered  him  by  the  upper  plane  of 
consciousness,  the  coin  manufactured  by  labour  and 
patience  and  skill,  is  itself  an  indication  from  the 
lower  plane  of  consciousness  that  that  conscious- 
ness has  something  finer  to  offer,  something  which 
it  will  gladly  surrender  if  only  the  invitation  have 
tact.  The  sensation  of  dissatisfaction  is,  it  should 

[>773 


SCEPTICISMS 

be  noted,  not  merely  a  negative  affair.  It  relates 
sharply  to  the  thing  with  which  he  is  dissatisfied, 
hints  at  the  specific  incompleteness  of  that  thing. 
And  it  is  about  this  spark-point  of  dissatisfaction 
that  he  proceeds  to  generate,  out  of  the  fine  air  of 
expectancy,  the  combustible  vapour  which  shall 
invite  the  explosion.  It  is  then,  if  he  is  fortunate, 
that  he  does  not  merely  find,  but  actually  hears, 
the  rhythm,  the  melody,  the  singular  and  unpre- 
meditated tone  of  the  next  movement.  Its  su- 
periority to  what  he  had  at  first  in  mind  is  mani- 
fest. And  his  poem  at  this  point  takes  on  the 
glow  and  impetus  of  which  perhaps  it  has  hitherto 
not  been  able  quite  to  guess  the  secret.  It  re- 
mains then  only  to  take  this  tone-colour,  so  charm- 
ingly a  gift,  and  give  it  a  precision  of  shape — to 
relate  it  organically,  by  employment  of  ideas  akin 
to  those  in  the  preceding  movement,  with  the  gen- 
eral theme  of  the  poem. 

If  something  like  this,  therefore,  is  true  of  the 
method  of  poetic  composition,  it  will  be  seen,  when 
one  considers  its  impalpability,  how  wide  is  the 
margin  for  error  when  one  seeks  with  any  exact- 
ness to  define  it,  or,  with  regard  to  its  use  of  con- 
scious and  subconscious,  to  delimit  it.  The  poet, 
it  is  perceived,  no  matter  how  much  he  may  call 


MAGIC    OR   LEGERDEMAIN? 

upon  the  subconscious  and  deliver  himself  over  to 
it,  is  at  all  times  pretty  much  aware  of  what  he  is 
doing,  and  why ;  though  of  the  precise  reward  for 
it  he  may  be  singularly  uncertain.  It  is  with  this 
fact  in  mind  that  some  poets  belittle  the  value  of 
the  subconscious,  underestimate,  perhaps,  the  fre- 
quency with  which  they  call  upon  it.  They  do 
not  remember,  when  the  poem  is  finished,  at  what 
points,  or  how  many,  they  called  for  this  assist- 
ance; nor  have  they  the  modesty  to  admit  that 
those  things  in  the  poem  which  have  greatest 
magic  and  beauty  are  usually  not  the  product  of 
skill,  merely,  but  the  skilful  use  of  a  wealth  for 
the  most  part  subterranean,  a  natural  resource,  a 
wealth  to  which  they  have  been  given  access  occa- 
sionally, but  a  wealth  in  the  deposit  of  which  they 
have  played  as  little  conscious  part  as  the  surface 
of  the  earth  plays  in  the  crystallization  of  dia- 
monds. One  cannot  be  a  poet  without  a  fine  sen- 
sibility; one's  sensibility  is  hardly  controllable; 
and  the  greater  part  of  its  deposit  has  been  accum- 
ulated long  before  the  poet  is  aware  of  its  exist- 
ence. 

This  is  not  to  say  that  anybody  can  be  a  great 
poet  by  making  drafts  on  his  subconscious.  One 
cannot  dig  up  jewels  from  a  commonplace  sensi- 

[279] 


SCEPTICISMS 

bility,  though  quartz  crystals  may  be  plentiful. 
But  in  the  case  of  the  poet  who  is,  however  inter- 
mittently, a  genuine  poet,  one  may  safely  say,  I 
think,  that  it  is  when  he  is  most  the  craftsman 
that  he  is  least  magically  the  poet.  Craftsman- 
ship is  the  skill  with  which  the  poet  turns  his  sub- 
conscious treasure  to  account.  Without  that  ap- 
plication, no  matter  how  deft  it  may  be,  mere  skill, 
operating,  as  it  were,  in  the  air,  will  only  approxi- 
mate and  imitate  and  endeavour  to  deceive.  It  is 
a  thing  done  with  hands,  a  legerdemain,  not  magic ; 
one  soon  perceives  the  trick,  and  if  one  enjoys  it 
one  does  so  with  the  intellectual  coolness  of  ad- 
miration, not  with  full  emotional  surrender,  the 
uncontrolled  surrender  of  one's  own  aroused  sub- 
conscious. .  .  .  When  craftsmanship  induces  that 
surrender  it  proves  itself  to  be  more  than  crafts- 
manship. It  discloses  its  essentially  compulsory 
nature.  And  that  the  compulsions  which  give  it 
colour  are  often  analysable  is  not  to  say  that  the 
magic  it  achieves  is  a  magic  which  the  poet  can 
altogether  calculate. 


C280] 


XXX 

Appendix:    A  Note  on  Values 


IN  the  course  of  rereading  the  preceding  pa- 
pers for  the  last  time  before  sending  them  off 
to  the  printer,  I  find  many  things  which,  as 
no  doubt  even  my  most  sympathetic  reader  will 
agree,  ought  to  disquiet  me.  I  have  confessed 
with  some  candour  in  the  introduction  that  per- 
haps the  ruling  motive  of  my  activities  as  a  critic 
has  been  a  desire,  partly  conscious  and  partly  un- 
conscious, to  secure  an  understanding  and  recogni- 
tion of  the  particular  sorts  of  poetry  which  I  dis- 
cover myself,  in  this  singular  world,  doomed  to 
write;  but  I  begin  to  wonder,  at  this  point,  how 
honest  or  how  complete  that  confession  can  be 
considered  to  be.  In  what  way, — when  I  write  a 
critique,  largely  laudatory  of  John  Gould 
Fletcher,  or  of  Maxwell  Bodenheim,  or  of  Jean 
de  Bosschere, — do  I  clearly  advance  any  interest 
of  my  own1?  That  I  do  so  at  all  in  these  and  in 

[2813 


SCEPTICISMS 

other  instances  is,  I  think,  open  to  question.  If 
the  methods  of  such  poets  as  these  are  exclusively 
right,  and  if  these  are  the  methods  upon  which  pos- 
terity will  set  for  ever  the  seal  of  durability,  it  is 
obvious  enough  that  myself  the  critic  has  dealt 
myself  the  poet  a  shrewd  blow  in  the  back.  In 
my  attempt  to  be  honest  with  my  reader  have  I 
been  a  trifle  dishonest  with  myself?  It  is  not  too 
precisely  demonstrable  that  the  virtues  for  which 
I  praise  Fletcher  or  Bodenheim,  or  Masters  or 
Hueffer,  or  Lawrence  or  Eliot,  are  the  virtues  at 
which,  in  the  course  of  a  struggling  evolution,  my 
own  poetry  might  be  said  to  aim.  They  are,  in 
fact,  often  essentially  different.  An  error  has  here 
been  detected:  in  my  introduction  I  ignored  the 
fact  that  an  artist  may,  and  often  does,  react 
sympathetically  to  a  species  of  art  quite  antipa- 
thetic to  his  own.  In  this  error  I  may  possibly, 
therefore,  have  misled  my  reader:  he  may  have 
concluded,  reading  the  book  in  this  light,  that  the 
notes  of  Fletcher  or  of  Bodenheim  or  of  Masters 
or  of  de  Bosschere  or  of  Amy  Lowell  or  of  Eliot 
or  of  Gibson  or  of  Abercrombie,  since  I  gave  them 
about  equal  consideration,  are  regarded  by  me  as 
notes  discoverably  on  a  parity  of  importance  in 
my  own  work.  Well,  I  have  been  accused  of 

1:282] 


APPENDIX 

chameleonism,  and  to  some  degree  of  it  I  have 
pleaded  guilty;  but  to  assume  such  a  gift  of  his- 
trionism  as  this  would  be  fantastic.  Let  it  be 
considered  sufficient  if  I  say  that  in  this  regard 
the  range  of  my  tastes  is  wider  than  that  of  my 
abilities.  When  I  praise  Eliot  or  Frost  or  Boden- 
heim  or  William  Carlos  Williams,  let  some 
slight  trace  of  disinterestedness  be  conceded  to  me. 
Or  is  it — on  the  other  hand — merely  cowardice? 

ii 

But  to  be  exact,  the  whole  question  at  issue  is 
far  too  complex  for  so  curt  an  answer,  whether 
negative  or  affirmative.  It  is  true  that  a  poet- 
critic  will  tend  to  praise,  in  the  work  of  his  con- 
temporary poets,  that  sort  of  work  most  sympa- 
thetic with  his  own;  but  human  temperaments 
are  amazingly  unlike,  and  the  chances  are  much 
against  his  ever  finding  a  poet  with  a  temperament 
which  resembles  his  own  in  more  than  one  tiny 
particular.  Here,  indeed,  we  touch  another 
spring  of  widespread,  though  unconscious,  dishon- 
esty in  all  criticism.  For  it  is  precisely  by  these 
tiny  particulars,  often  of  so  slight  artistic  impor- 
tance, that  the  course  of  the  artist-critic  is  most  de- 
flected. I  have  just  remarked  that  Fletcher's 


SCEPTICISMS 

work  was  remarkably  unlike  my  own, — crediting 
myself  therefore  with  some  nobility  for  praising 
it;  but  it  would  be  more  completely  true  to  add 
that  nevertheless  when  I  read  the  work  of  Fletcher 
I  detect  in  it,  no  matter  how  much  his  technique 
may  at  moments  alienate  or  alarm  me,  some  subtle 
indefinable  scarcely  apprehensible  kinship  with 
my  own ;  and  this  kinship  outweighs  all  other  con- 
siderations. Not  the  least  of  the  critic's  embar- 
rassments is  the  fact  that  these  subtle  kinships  are 
totally  untranslatable :  they  are  so  impalpable,  they 
are  so  purely,  often,  in  the  realm  of  sensation,  they 
resist  so  mercurially  any  effort  to  pin  them  to  the 
walls  of  thought,  that  in  most  cases,  since  he  is 
moved  to  praise,  the  critic  will  find  himself  prais- 
ing his  poet  for  reasons  quite  other  than  those 
which  originally  moved  him.  Reduced  to  a  sin- 
gle sentence  perhaps  his  genuine  reaction  to  such  a 
poet  would  be  "Well !  this  poet  feels  the  same  way 
about  that  word  that  I  do";  or  "his  sense  of 
rhythm  is  curiously  like  mine,  with  certain  slight 
and  intriguing  differences";  or  "it  is  quite  clear 
that  he  found  that  out  for  himself — just  as  I  did." 
And  such  a  reaction  is  not,  as  it  may  at  first  appear, 
an  exceptional  sort  of  vanity.  All  human  judg- 
ments or  tastes  reduce  themselves  under  pressure 

1:284: 


APPENDIX 

to  the  terms  of  the  pathetic  ego  which  stands  as 
judge.  It  is  hypocrisy  to  pretend  anything  else. 
But  it  is  unfortunate,  just  the  same,  that  critics  so 
seldom  lay  bare  these  tiny  but  determinant  factors 
of  like  or  dislike,  and  so  frequently  allow  them  to 
colour  their  attitude  toward  other  parts  of  an  art- 
ist's work  with  which  these  factors  have  little  or 
nothing  to  do.  Because  Matthew  Arnold  was  a 
teacher,  or  a  Victorian,  or  wrote  occasionally,  as  it 
were,  from  Rugby  Chapel,  is  no  adequate  reason 
for  refusing  to  like  "Dover  Beach"  or  his  trans- 
lation of  Maurice  de  Guerin's  "Centaur." 

in 

But  my  kindly  imaginary  interlocutor  asks  me, 
at  this  point,  how  it  is,  if  we  like  a  work  of  art 
only  because  it  reflects  ourselves,  or  because  it 
gives  expression  to  some  part  of  us  which  was  inar- 
ticulate, or  consciousness  to  some  part  of  us  which 
was  unconscious,  that  it  is  possible  for  us  to  like 
so  many  and  so  dissimilar  kinds  of  work.  The  an- 
swer is  simple.  It  is  precisely  because,  on  the 
whole,  the  reflections  of  the  human  organism,  or 
consciousness,  in  the  work  of  any  particular  art- 
ist, are  so  tiny  and  so  incomplete,  that  we  are 
compelled,  if  we  are  to  discover  ourselves  with 

[285:1 


SCEPTICISMS 

anything  like  completeness  or  find  ourselves  mir- 
rored at  full  length,  to  gather  our  reflections  m 
splintered  fragments,  to  assemble  the  portrait  bit 
by  bit.  If  the  poet-critic,  therefore,  sets  about 
composing  a  self-portrait  which  shall  never  em- 
ploy a  stroke  in  the  first  person  singular,  but  em- 
ploy only  those  aspects  of  himself  which  he  finds 
in  his  contemporaries — an  undertaking  which  may 
or  may  not  be  conscious,  usually  not — it  should  be 
perceived  at  once  that  the  process  will  be  labori- 
ous and  confused,  that  it  will  lead  him  at  many 
points  far  afield,  and  that  if  the  resultant  portrait 
is  to  attain  anything  like  completeness  it  will 
necessarily  be  forced  to  draw,  for  some  items,  on 
sources  which  at  first  glimpse  might  appear  un- 
promising. Confused  it  must,  certainly,  seem  to 
the  reader,  provided  that  the  reader  has  at  all  been 
let  into  the  secret;  provided  that  the  poet-critic 
has  at  all  confessed  what  he  himself  may  not  have 
realized,  the  essential  self-portrayal  of  any  kind  of 
criticism.  For  what  will  be  the  key  to  this  parade 
of  likes  and  dislikes — at  what  points  is  one  to  pre- 
sume there  was  an  intention  of  emphasis'?  It 
would  be  simple  enough,  no  doubt,  if  any  human 
organism  maintained  a  standard  rate  of  efficiency, 
burned  at  a  standard  degree  of  intensity,  never 
C286] 


APPENDIX 

varying  in  luminosity  or  height.  But  the  human 
organism  is  variable.  Its  identity  is  lost  if  a  sec- 
tion of  it  be  frozen  for  analysis;  its  identity  is 
largely  in  its  motion;  and  a  motion  so  irregular 
is  incommensurable  and  unpredictable.  The  poet- 
critic  is  a  creature  of  varying  moods.  He  dis- 
likes today  what  he  will  like  tomorrow.  He  finds 
his  tastes  changing,  fed  to  satiety,  outgrown,  re- 
turned to  in  a  modified  form.  Moreover  his  per- 
ceptions cannot  be  standardized:  they  are  clearer 
at  one  time  than  at  another,  and  he  is  not  likely 
to  perceive  this  variability.  At  what  degree  of 
clarity  shall  one  say  that  his  perceptions  are  most 
in  character — when  he  says  he  likes  So-and-so,  for 
such-and-such  reasons,  or  when  he  likes  somebody 
else  for  reasons  obviously  contradictory*?  To  this 
question  there  can  be  no  downright  answer.  One 
can  surmise,  taking  into  account  all  the  evidence, 
but  one  can  do  no  more — unless  the  critic  himself 
comes  forward,  key  in  hand. 

IV 

At  this  point  it  would  be  appropriate  for  me  to 
supply  a  kind  of  glossary  of  the  foregoing  pages, 
explaining  in  the  case  of  each  study  how  I  had  hap- 
pened to  take  toward  the  particular  poet  the  par- 


SCEPTICISMS 

ticular  attitude  disclosed.  Mr.  Bodenheim,  for 
instance,  has  said  to  me,  shrewdly  enough,  that 
my  estimate  of  his  work  is  less  than  just  because 
I  go  out  of  my  way,  apparently,  to  condemn  it  for 
its  lack  of  philosophical  background.  "Why," 
remarks  Mr.  Bodenheim — "drag  in  philosophy 
(which  I  assure  you  does  not  concern  me) — except 
to  advertise  a  quality  in  poetry  at  which  your  own 
work  is  aimed*?"  Well,  there  we  are.  I  like 
poetry  which  plays  with  ideas  quite  as  joyously  as 
with  moods  or  sensations.  I  should  regret  it  ex- 
tremely if  during  any  considerable  part  of  my 
life — (for  at  all  events  it  could  hardly  last  longer) 
mood-symbolism  and  impressionism  of  this  kind, 
exquisite  and  fragmentary,  should  attain  such 
a  popularity  as  to  exclude  from  the  public  atten- 
tion any  work  which  differed  from  it.  It  is  of 
course  ridiculous,  as  Mr.  Bodenheim  might  ob- 
serve, to  insist  that  a  mosaic  should  have  for  its 
background  a  temple  or  cathedral ;  but  it  seems  to 
me  not  amiss,  at  a  moment  when  filigree  exacts  so 
much  attention,  to  remind  those  who  peer  in  dark 
corners  of  wall  or  floor  for  delicate  bits  of  tracery 
that  above  their  heads  are  ceiling  and  sky.  Archi- 
tecture, whether  human  or  superhuman,  is  being 
too  often  overlooked. 

[288] 


APPENDIX 


To  pursue  this  method  any  further  into  the 
realm  of  autobiography,  however,  would  be  too 
painfully  minute  and  dull.  It  would,  indeed, 
necessitate  a  second  book  longer  than  the  first,  a 
book  of  which  the  nature  would  be  psychological 
rather  than  literary.  A  considerable  portion  of  it 
would  have  to  deal  with  my  personal  acquaintance 
with  my  fellow  poets,  and  with  the  effect  this  has 
had  upon  my  essays  in  criticism.  Is  one  necessa- 
rily kinder  to  a  poet  whom  one  has  encountered 
in  the  flesh,  particularly  if  one  has  found  him 
agreeable*?  No, — one  is  merely  more  urbane. 
One  spares  him  certain  sharpnesses,  no  doubt,  the 
more  brutal  of  one's  weapons  are  abstained  from, 
one  may  even  make  a  more  determined  effort  than 
otherwise  to  find  out  his  good  qualities,  but  essen- 
tially one's  attitude  is  unshaken.  .  .  .  That  is,  if 
one  is  honest.  But  I  confess  that  in  this  regard 
as  in  others  I  am  only  human.  There  are  one  or 
two  instances  in  which  personal  acquaintance 
seems  to  have  given  me  an  insight  into  a  poet's 
work  which  not  even  the  resultantly  increased  at- 
tention could  otherwise  have  done.  Perhaps  one 
loses  a  trace  of  one's  neutrality.  It  is  possible 

1:289:1 


SCEPTICISMS 

that  one  should  refrain  from  acquaintanceship  al- 
together, and  make  of  one's  self  a  machine  for  re- 
cording sensations,  as  exact,  within  its  advertised 
limits,  as  is  psychologically  attainable.  It  would 
be  one's  reward,  of  course,  to  be  considered  ego- 
tistical and  dishonest. 

VI 

I  refrain  from  further  autobiography,  therefore ; 
but  there  remains  one  point  which  in  the  interests 
of  justice  should  be  illuminated.  It  is  impos- 
sible to  supply  for  every  critical  study  the  com- 
plete personal  key,  but  there  is  a  pass-key  to  the 
present  collection  which  should  not  be  overlooked. 
It  will  be  observed  that  throughout  this  book  I 
have  seldom  made,  as  regards  any  specific  poet,  flat 
assertions  of  importance,  or  rank:  what  values  I 
have  employed  are  for  the  most  part  comparative, 
or  implied  merely  in  the  length  and  seriousness  of 
the  treatment.  If  I  were  asked,  for  example, 
whether  I  considered  any  of  the  poets  with  whom 
I  deal  great  poets,  or  poets  nearly  great,  or  poets 
who  had  attained  to  a  power  or  perfection,  at  mo- 
ments, which  was  likely  to  preserve  their  names 
for  an  indefinite  period,  I  should  preserve  an  em- 
barrassed silence.  I  do  not  know.  As  concerns 
[290] 


APPENDIX 

the  greater  number  of  them  the  answer  would  be 
unqualifiedly  negative.  If  I  have  treated  them 
seriously,  particularly  those  poets  who  are  Ameri- 
can, it  is  largely  because  they  have  a  certain  posi- 
tion, because  they  have  raised  issues  which  cannot 
be  flippantly  dismissed,  must  be  squarely  met. 
For  the  present,  the  majority  of  our  poets  are  not 
so  much  poets  as  symptoms.  And,  for  that  mat- 
ter, at  a  moment  such  as  this,  which  seems  so 
clearly  a  prelude  rather  than  a  performance,  it  is 
the  symptoms  which  are  most  important.  No  fur- 
ther apology  seems  necessary. 

VII 

The  point  is  one  on  which  I  should  like  to  di- 
gress, if  indeed  digression  is  theoretically  possible 
in  such  notes  as  these,  of  which  digression  is  the 
principle.  I  am  asked  whether  I  do  not  consider 
that  certain  of  the  works  of  Robert  Frost,  or  Edgar 
Lee  Masters,  or  Amy  Lowell,  or  Vachel  Lindsay, 
have  the  qualities  of  the  finest  art.  And  here  I 
must  confess  that  I  am  much  harder  to  please  than 
even  the  studies  which  compose  this  book  would 
suggest.  Because  I  enjoy  the  work  of  Masters, 
or  Lindsay  or  Miss  Lowell  is  no  reason, — as  too 
many  American  critics  seem  to  think  it  is, — for 


SCEPTICISMS 

supposing  the  work  "great"  or  "fine,"  or  whatever 
word  one  wishes  to  use  for  defining  that  suprem- 
est  of  pleasures  one  derives  from  a  work  of  art. 
The  pleasures,  of  this  sort,  which  contemporary 
poetry  affords  me  are  for  the  most  part  on  a  quite 
secondary  plane:  the  moments  at  which  they  rise 
to  the  other  plane  are  few.  To  this  secondary 
plane  I  should  unhesitatingly  relegate  such  fa- 
vourites, delightful  as  they  are,  as  "The  Congo" 
or  "Patterns" — no,  not  unhesitatingly,  but  I 
should  do  it.  We  are  brilliant,  we  are  clever  to 
the  point  of  brilliance,  in  such  poems,  but  we  are 
not  fine.  Where  indeed  in  the  work  of  any  con- 
temporary American  poet  shall  we  discover  a  con- 
sistent unison  of  power  and  fineness?  We  have, 
I  think,  no  such  poet.  The  great  poet  is  not,  con- 
spicuously at  any  rate,  amongst  us.  We  have  iso- 
lated poems  which  achieve  the  unison  just  men- 
tioned— we  have  Robinson's  "Ben  Jonson  Enter- 
tains a  Man  from  Stratford,"  we  have  Eliot's 
"Love  Song  of  J.  Alfred  Prufrock,"  we  have  the 
Blue  and  Green  and  White  Symphonies  of 
Fletcher,  two  or  three  pseudo-translations  from 
the  Chinese  by  Pound,  "Home  Burial"  by  Frost, 
and  perhaps  a  dozen  or  two  shorter  things  of  ex- 
quisite beauty, — such  as  "Peter  Quince  at  the 
[292] 


APPENDIX 

Clavier"  by  Stevens.     And  then  there  is  "Spoon 
River." 

VIII 

It  is,  I  know,  unpopular  at  present,  to  employ 
in  criticism  what  is  known  as  the  comparative 
method.  A  work  of  art  should  be  estimated  in  ac- 
cordance as  it  achieves  what  it  purports  to  achieve, 
not  in  accordance  as  it  achieves  something  else. 
One  should  not  expect  an  intaglio  to  shelter  us 
from  a  winter  wind.  But  that  theory  has  its  lim- 
its :  shall  the  rotten  apple  be  excused  for  its  rotten- 
ness, on  the  ground  that  the  rottenness  is  perfect*? 
Or  has  one  a  right  to  compare  it  with  something  a 
little  more  attractive  and  sustaining4?  I  like,  for 
example,  some  of  the  racy  titbits  offered  in  the 
two  "Others"  anthologies;  I  like,  equally  within 
their  limits,  "Patterns"  or  "The  Congo" ;  but  have 
I  not  the  right  to  see,  beyond  and  above  these, 
and  overshadowing  them,  "Modern  Love"  by 
George  Meredith,  or  "Emblems  of  Love"  by  Las- 
celles  Abercrombie  or  "An  Anthem  of  Earth"  by 
Francis  Thompson1?  Set  "Patterns"  against  a 
part  of  "Modern  Love"  or  "The  Congo"  against 
"An  Anthem  of  Earth";  they  will  not  lose  their 
charm  of  colour,  their  superficial  brightness,  but 

[2933 


SCEPTICISMS 

observe  how  immediately  they  appear  loose  and 
amateurish;  their  essential  second-rateness  is  ex- 
posed. That  I  feel  it  in  this  way  is  not,  I  think, 
mere  idiosyncrasy.  It  is  not  that  I  do  not  like  the 
stuff  of  which  "Patterns"  or  "The  Congo"  is 
made:  that  objection  would  be  idiosyncratic;  it  is 
because  I  am  not  satisfied  with  the  manner  in 
which  they  are  made,  with  the  skill  of  the  artist, 
it  is  because  they  seem  to  me  incomplete  and 
shoddy  as  works  of  art,  intermittently  felt  and  in- 
termittently performed,  neither  finely  perceived 
nor  finely  executed,  that,  for  all  the  pleasure  they 
give  me,  I  must  withhold  from  them  a  higher  esti- 
mate. They  are  the  performance,  insecure  and 
imprecise,  of  amateurs  remarkably  gifted,  not  the 
performance  of  artists  for  whom  precision  and 
beauty  of  finish  are  inevitable.  The  trouble  is  at 
bottom,  no  doubt,  that  the  sensibility  of  the  poet 
is  not,  in  either  case,  sufficiently  rich  or  varied  or 
subtle,  extends  too  little,  in  the  one  case,  beyond 
brilliant  superficialities  of  colour  and  external 
shape,  too  little  in  the  other  case  beyond  the  pow- 
erful commonplaces  of  gusto  and  rhythm  and  rhet- 
oric. The  finer  aspects  of  sense,  the  finer  shades 
of  emotion,  and  those  crepuscular  realms  which  lie 

[2943 


APPENDIX 

between  sensation  and  thought,  but  to  which  the 
approach  is  tactile,  have  to  both  poets  been  denied. 
The  misfortune  is  a  common  one  in  the  history  of 
poetry:  let  us  remember  such  poets  as  Campbell 
and  Edwin  Arnold;  when  we  are  tempted  to  rate 
Lindsay  too  high  on  the  ground  that  he  is  from 
the  American  point  of  view  so  charmingly  autoch- 
thonous, let  us  recall  the  "Ingoldsby  Legends." 

IX 

I  have  emphasized  these  two  instances  chiefly 
because  they  are  so  typical.  Their  artistic  incom- 
pleteness is  characteristic  of  contemporary  Ameri- 
can poetry,  and  I  should  like  it  to  be  understood 
that  it  is  only  with  this  basic  reservation  in  mind 
that  the  relatively  serious  discussions  which  com- 
pose this  book  should  be  received.  It  is  not  a 
question  of  radical  as  against  reactionary:  it  is  not 
a  question  of  American  as  against  European :  it  is 
simply  and  solely  a  question  of  whether  the  given 
poem  has  beauty,  subtlety,  intensity,  and  depth, 
or  whether  it  has  not,  and  in  what  degree.  That 
it  is  in  free  verse  or  a  sonnet,  that  it  deals  with 
the  purely  local  and  indigenous  or  not,  is  not  neces- 
sarily of  great  consequence.  All  that  is  necessary 

[295] 


SCEPTICISMS 

is  that  it  should  be  the  work  of  an  artist,  achieved 
in  a  moment  of  maximum  efficiency :  a  sort  of  effi- 
ciency which  we  may  leave  the  psychologist  to  ex- 
plain. 


C2963 


SELECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Abercrombie,  Lascelles:     Interludes  and  Poems.     John 

Lane  Co. 

Emblems  of  Love.     John  Lane  Co. 
Aldington,  Richard :     Images.     The  Four  Seas  Co. 
Bodenheim,  Maxwell:     Minna  and  Myself.     Pagan. 
Bosschere,  Jean  de :     The  Closed  Door.     John  Lane  Co. 
Bradley,  William  Aspenwall :     Old  Christmas.     Hough- 
ton,  Mifflin  Co. 
Branch,    Anna    Hempstead:     The    Shoes    that    Danced. 

Houghton,  Mifflin  Co. 
Rose  of  the  Wind.     Houghton,  Mifflin  Co. 
Brooke,  Rupert:     Collected  Poems.     John  Lane  Co. 
Bynner,  Witter :    Grenstone  Poems.    Frederick  A.  Stokes 

Co. 

Davies,  W.  H. :     Collected  Poems.     Alfred  A.  Knopf. 
H.  D. :     Sea  Garden.     Houghton,  Mifflin  Co. 
De  la  Mare,  Walter:     The  Listeners.     Henry  Holt  & 

Co. 

Peacock  Pie.     Henry  Holt  &  Co. 
Eliot,  T.  S. :     Prufrock  and  Other  Observations.     Alfred 

A.  Knopf. 

Poems.     Richmond  Hogarth  Press. 

Evans,  Donald:     Two  Deaths  in  the  Bronx.     Nicholas 
L.  Brown. 

[297] 


SCEPTICISMS 

Fletcher,  John  Gould:     Irradiations:  Sand  and  Spray. 

Houghton,  Mifflin  Co. 

Goblins  and  Pagodas.     Houghton,  Mifflin  Co. 
Japanese  Prints.     The  Four  Seas  Co. 
The  Tree  of  Life.     The  Macmillan  Co. 
Frost,  Robert :     A  Boy's  Will.     Henry  Holt  &  Co. 
North  of  Boston.     Henry  Holt  &  Co. 
Mountain  Interval.     Henry  Holt  &  Co. 
Gibson,  Wilfrid  Wilson:     Collected  Poems.     The  Mac- 
millan Co. 
Giovannitti,    Arturo:     Arrows    in    the    Gale.     Hillacre 

Bookhouse. 
Graves,     Robert:     Fairies     and     Fusiliers.     Alfred    A. 

Knopf. 

Hardy,  Thomas:     The  Dynasts.     The  Macmillan  Co. 
Poems  of  the  Past  and  Present.     The  Macmillan  Co. 
Satires  of  Circumstance.     The  Macmillan  Co. 
Time's  Laughing  Stocks.     The  Macmillan  Co. 
Hodgson,  Ralph :     Poems.     The  Macmillan  Co. 
Hueffer,  Ford  Madox:     On  Heaven  and  Other  Poems. 

John  Lane  Co. 

Collected  Poems.     Max  Goschen. 
Some  Imagist  Poets.     (First,  second  and  third  series.) 

Houghton,  Mifflin  Co. 
Johns,  Orrick:     Asphalt  and  Other  Poems.     Alfred  A. 

Knopf. 
Kreymborg,  Alfred:     Mushrooms.     Alfred  A.  Knopf. 

Plays  for  Poem-Mimes.     Others. 

Kreymborg,  Alfred   (editor)  :     Others  (first  and  second 
series).     Alfred  A.  Knopf. 

[298;] 


SELECTIVE    BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Lawrence,  D.  H. :     Poems.     B.  W.  Huebsch. 

Look!     We  Have  Come  Through.     B.  W.  Huebsch. 
Lindsay,  Vachel :     General  William  Booth  Enters  Into 

Heaven  and  Other  Poems.     The  Macmillan  Co. 
The  Congo  and  Other  Poems.     The  Macmillan  Co. 
The  Chinese  Nightingale.     The  Macmillan  Co. 
Lowell,   Amy:     Sword   Blades   and   Poppy   Seed.     The 

Macmillan  Co. 

Men,  Women,  and  Ghosts.     The  Macmillan  Co. 
Can  Grande's  Castle.     The  Macmillan  Co. 
Six  French  Poets.     The  Macmillan  Co. 
Tendencies  in  Modern  American  Poetry.     The  Mac- 
millan Co. 
Lowes,    John    Livingston :     Convention    and    Revolt   in 

Poetry.     Houghton,  Mifflin  Co. 
Masters,    Edgar    Lee:     Spoon    River    Anthology.     The 

Macmillan  Co. 

The  Great  Valley.     The  Macmillan  Co. 
Toward  the  Gulf.     The  Macmillan  Co. 
Masefield,  John :     Poems.     The  Macmillan  Co. 

Plays.     The  Macmillan  Co. 
Matthews,   E.   Powys :     Coloured    Stars.     Fifty   Asiatic 

Love  Poems.     Houghton,  Mifflin  Co. 
Monro,  Harold :     Trees.     Poetry  Bookshop. 

Strange  Meetings.     Poetry  Bookshop. 
Monroe,  Harriet   (editor)  :     The  New  Poetry,  An  An- 
thology.    The  Macmillan  Co. 

Nichols,  Robert:     Ardours  and  Endurances.     Frederick 
A.  Stokes  Co. 

[299] 


SCEPTICISMS 

Pound,  Ezra:     Lustra.     Alfred  A.  Knopf. 
Pavannes  and  Divisions.     Alfred  A.  Knopf, 
(editor) :     Des    Imagistes.     An    Anthology.     Boni   & 

Liveright. 

Ridge,  Lola:     The  Ghetto.     B.  W.  Huebsch. 
Robinson,     Edwin     Arlington:     Captain     Craig.     The 

Macmillan  Co. 

Children  of  the  Night.     Charles  Scribner's  Sons. 
The  Town  Down  the  River.     Charles  Scribner's  Sons. 
The  Man  Against  the  Sky.     The  Macmillan  Co. 
Merlin.     The  Macmillan  Co. 
Sandburg,  Carl :     Chicago  Poems.     Henry  Holt  &  Co. 

Cornhuskers.     Henry  Holt  &  Co. 
Squire,  J.  C. :     Poems.     Alfred  A.  Knopf. 
Stevens,  Wallace:     See  The  New  Poetry.     1st  and  2nd 

Others  Anthologies. 
Tietjens,    Eunice:     Profiles    from    China.     Alfred    A. 

Knopf. 
Untermeyer,  Louis :     The  New  Era  in  American  Poetry. 

Henry  Holt  &  Co. 
Williams,  William  Carlos :     Al  Que  Quiere.     The  Four 

Seas  Co. 

Waley,     Arthur     (translator)  :     170     Chinese     Poems. 
Alfred  A.  Knopf. 


INDEX 


Abercrombie,    Lascelles :     12, 

51,  60,  173,  282,  293 
AKRA  THE  SLAVE:  199,  200 
Aldington,    Richard:    59,   93, 

176,  191 

AL  QUE  QUIERE  :  178  ff. 
AMORES:  99 
ANTHOLOGY      OF     MAGAZINE 

VERSE:  48 
ARDOURS    AND    ENDURANCES  : 

173  ff- 

Arensberg,  Walter:  241 
Arnold,  Edwin :  295 
Arnold,  Matthew:  68-285 

Balzac:  134 

BATTLE,  AND  OTHER  POEMS  : 
199 

Becquer,  Henri :  68,  69 

Belloc,   Hilaire:  221 

Benet,  William  Rose :  187  ff. 

Bodenheim,  Maxwell:  13,  62, 
127,  176,  232  ff.,  241,  165, 
167,  268,  269,  281,  282,  2283, 
288 

Bonnard,  Abel :  35,  38,  39 

BORDERLANDS  AND  THOROUGH- 
FARES :  199 

Bosschere,  Jean  de :  160, 
163  ff.,  281,  282 

BOSTON  EVENING  TRAN- 
SCRIPT :  126 

Bradley,  William  Aspenwall : 
199  ff- 


Braithwaite,    William    Stan- 
ley, 48  ff.,  126  ff.,  179 
Branch,  Anna  Hempstead :  49 
Brody,  Alter:  262,  265,  270 
Brooke,  Rupert:  222 
Browning,  Robert:  171,  172 
BURGLAR     OF     THE     ZODIAC, 

THE:  187  ff. 
Burr,  Amelia  Josephine:   53, 

128 
Byron:  170 

Campbell,  Thomas :  295 
CAN    GRANDE'S    CASTLE:    22, 

US  ff. 

Carman,  Bliss:  53,  128,  129 
CATHAY:  139 
CHALLENGE:  259 
Chaucer :  170 
CHICAGO  POEMS  :  53,  55 
170  CHINESE  POEMS  :  224  ff. 
CHINESE  LYRICS  :  224  ff. 
CHINESE  NIGHTINGALE,  THE: 

157 

CLOSED  DOOR,   THE  :    163  ff. 
Coleridge,  S.  T. :  264 
CONGO,  THE:  156,  293,  294 
Cranmer-Byng,  G. :  224  ff. 
Crapsey,  Adelaide :  53 
CRITICAL      ANTHOLOGY,      A : 

126  ff. 
Croce,  Benedetto:  24,  147 

DAFFODIL   FIELDS,   THE:    151, 
174 


INDEX 


DAILY  BREAD:  199 
D'Annunzio,     Gabriele  :     194, 

197 

Dante  :  194,  197,  232 
Dargan,  Olive  Tilford:  128 
DAUBER,  THE:  151 
Davies,  W.  H.  :  53,  59,  190 
De  La  Mare,  Walter:  51,  53, 

59,  187  ff.,  206  ff.,  222,  267 
"H.D.":     92,     93,     191,    334, 

252  ff.,  267 
DIAL,  THE:  28 
D'Orge,  Jeanne:   162 

EIDOLA  :  173  ff. 

Eliot,  T.  S.:  23,  80,  98,  127, 
129,  161,  162,  163,  177, 
199  ff.,  238,  265,  267,  268, 
270,  282,  283,  290 

EMBLEMS  OF  LOVE:  293 

Euripides  :   134 

EVERLASTING     MERCY,     THE  : 


FAIRIES       AND       FUSILIERS  : 

193  «. 

FIRES:  199 

Firkins,  O.  W.  :  57 

Flaubert,  Gustave:  119 

Fletcher,  John  Gould  :  13,  50, 
53,  54,  58,  60,  62,  93,  94, 
105  ff.,  130,  161,  176,  187  ff., 
222,  245,  252  ff.,  265,  267, 
268,  269,  270,  281,  282,  283, 
284,  292 

Flint,  F.  S.:  163 

Fontanelle:  138 

Free  Verse  :  76  ff.,  85  ff.,  91  ff., 
1  15,  232  ff.,  242  ff.,  295 

Freud,    Sigmund  :    26,    33  ff., 


42,  46,  69,  133,  217,  229,  273 
Frost,  Robert :  12,  30,  49,  50, 
54,  55,  58,  60,  62,  65,  66,  69, 
127,  144,  170,  173,  177, 
252  ff.,  262,  266,  269,  283, 
291 

Garrison,  Theodosia:  178  ff. 
GENERAL      WILLIAM      BOOTH 

ENTERS  INTO  HEAVEN  :  156 
Georgian  Poets :   173 
GHETTO,  THE:  86  ff. 
Gibson,  Wilfrid  Wilson:   12, 

Si,    59,   66,    127,    147,    173, 

199  ff.,  222-282 
Giovanitti,  Arturo :   262,  265, 

270 
Glaenzer,     Richard     Butler : 

216  ff. 
GOBLINS  AND  PAGODAS  :  53,  55, 

105  ff.,  191,  192 
GOOD    FRIDAY:    53,    149,    152, 

153 

Graves,  Robert :  193  ff. 
GREAT  VALLEY,  THE:  53,  55 
Gregh,  Fernand :  35 
Guerin,  Maurice  de :  285 

Hagedorn,  Hermann:   128 
Haraucourt,  M. :  35 
HARVEST  MOON  :  53 
Helton,  Roy:   193  ff. 
Hodgson,  Ralph :  59,  206  ff. 
Hogarth,  William :  71 
Hoyt,  Helen:  162 
Hueffer,  Ford  Madox:  76  ff., 

282 

Hugo,  Victor:  34,  41 
Hunt,  Leigh:  213 


[302;] 


INDEX 


Imagists,  The:  12,  16,  18,  19, 
49,  53,  54,  55,  61,  65,  66,  98, 
144,  160,  173,  185,  187,  211, 
232,  233,  234,  238,  265 

INGOLDSBY     LEGENDS,     THE: 

295 

IRRADIATIONS  :  SAND  AND 
SPRAY  :  54,  105  ff.,  191 

JAPANESE      PRINTS  :       105  ff., 

187  ff. 
Johns,  Orrick:   170,  171,   172, 

231 

Keats,  John :  170,  171,  172,  231 
Kilmer,  Joyce :  56,  178  ff. 
Kostyleff,   Nicolas  :  34  ff.,  46, 

107,  108,  181,  183,  273 
Kreymborg,    Alfred:    12,    49, 

53,    55,    62,    161,    162,    238, 

240  ff.,  267,  268,  269 

Laforgue,  Jules :  137 
Lawrence,  D.  H. :  91  ff.,  282 
Ledoux,  Louis  V. :  128 
Lindsay,     Vachel :      54,     58, 

155  ff.,    219,    269,    291,    292, 

293,  294 
Li  Po:  230 

LISTENERS,  THE:  53,  190 
LIVELIHOOD  :   199 
LOLLINGDON      DOWNS  :       149, 

153 

Longfellow,  Henry  Wads- 
worth  :  182 

LOOK  !  WE  HAVE  COME 
THROUGH  :  91  ff. 

Lowell,  Amy:  13,  21,  22,  23, 
29,  49,  50,  54,  55,  58,  59,  60, 


62,    100,    nsff.,    130,    173, 

191,  219,  222,  251  ff.,  252, 
266,  269,  282,  291,  292,  293, 
294,  295 

Loy,  Mina :  162,  241 
LUTE  OF  JADE,  A  :  224  ff. 
LYRICAL  BALLADS  :  77,  80 


Mallarme,  Stephane:   112 
MAN     AGAINST     THE     SKY, 

THE:  55 

Manning,  Frederic :  170  ff. 
Masefield,  John:  51,  66,   147, 

149  ff.,  170  ff.,  173,  197,  199, 

2OO,   222 

Masters,  Edgar  Lee :  12,  49, 
53,  54,  55,  58,  59,  60,  62, 
65  ff.,  69,  98,  129,  144,  161, 

173,     177,     221,     252  ff.,     262, 
266,    267,    269,    282,    291,    293 

MECANISME  CEREBRALE  DE  LA 

PEN  SEE,  LE:  34 
Mencken,  H.  L. :  57 
MEN,  WOMEN,  AND  GHOSTS  : 

22,  55 
Meredith,    George:    99,    134, 

153,  172,  293 

MINNA  AND  MYSELF  :  232  ff. 
MODERN  LOVE:  99,  293 
Monro,  Harold:  206 ff. 
Monroe,  Harriet :  13,  56,  57 
Montesquieu,   Robert  de:   35, 

4i 

Moore,  Marianne,  162,  241 
Morley,  Christopher:  216 ff. 
Morris,  William:  171 
MOTLEY  :  187  tf . 
MOUNTAIN  INTERVAL:  55 
MUSHROOMS  :  53,  55,  240  ff. 


C303] 


INDEX 


NEW     ERA     IN     AMERICAN 

POETRY,  THE:  29,  258 ff. 
NEW  PATHS:  194,  195 
NEW   POEMS:    (D.   H.  Law- 
rence)  09 

NEW  REPUBLIC,  The:  28 
NEW  YORK  TIMES,  The :  28 
Nichols,  Robert:  170 ff. 
Noailles,  Madame  de:  35,  38 
NORTH  OF  BOSTON  :  54,  66,  173, 
175,  187 

OLD  CHRISTMAS  :  199  ff. 
ON  HEAVEN  :  76 
Oppenheim,    James:    49,    53, 

262,  265 
Ossian :  86 

OTHERS:  12,  49,  55,  62,  129, 
i6off.,  168,  173,  187,  240, 
267,  293 

OUTCASTS  IN  BEULAH  LAND: 
193  ff- 

PAVANNES     AND    DIVISIONS  : 

136 

Pavlov's  Law :  69 
PEACOCK  PIE:  100,  266 ff. 
PLAYS    FOR    POEM     MIMES  : 

240  ff. 

Po  Chii  I:  227,  230 
Poe,  Edgar  Allan:    172,  188, 

263,  272 

"POETRY"  :  49,  57,  207 
Pound,  Ezra:  13,  21,  49,  115, 

136  ff.,  160,  191,  267,  292 
Powys,  John  Cowper :    178  ff. 
PRUFROCK    AND    OTHER    OB- 
SERVATIONS :  109  ff. 


Reed,  Edward  Bliss  :  178  ff. 


Reese,    Lizette    Woodworth : 

128 

Ridge,  Lola :  85  ff.,  262 
Robinson,  Edwin   Arlington : 

30,   55,   58,   59,  60,   62,   65, 

08,  128,  252  ff.,  262,  266,  267, 

269,  293 

Rodker,  John:  129,  161 
ROSAS  :  173 

Sandburg,   Carl:    53,   55,   65, 

129,  143  ff.,  252  ff.,  262,  265, 

269 

Santayana,  George :  100,  236 
Seeger,  Alan :  133  ff.,  222 
Service,  Robert  W. :  25,  197 
Shakespeare :   134 
Shelley,   P.    B. :    68,   69,    171, 

265 

Sinclair,  May:  164 
SOME     IMAGIST     POETS  :     53. 

See  "Imagists" 
SONGS  AND  BALLADS  :   150 
SONGS   AND   SATIRES:   53,  55, 

72,  73 
SONGS  FOR  A  LITTLE  HOUSE: 

216  ff. 

Spingarn,  Joel  Elias :  24 
SPOON  RIVER  ANTHOLOGY:  17, 

18,    19,   54,   63,   66,   73,   74, 

173,  187,  256,  267,  293 
Stevens,    Wallace:    62,     127, 

129,  161,  162,  176,  238,  241, 

267,  268,  293 

Stork,  Charles   Wharton :   54 
STRANGE   MEETINGS  :   206  ff. 
Swinburne,  Algernon 

Charles :   172,  264 
SWORD    BLADES     AND     POPPY 

SEED:  22,  187 


[3043 


INDEX 


Tagore,  Rabindranath :  54 
TENDENCIES       IN       MODERN 

AMERICAN  POETRY:  21,  22, 

29,  251  ff. 

Tennyson,  Alfred:  144,  172 
Thompson,  Francis :   293 
Thomson,  James   ("B.  V.")  : 

172 

TOWARD  THE  GULF:  72 
TREASURY   OF   WAR    POETRY  : 

216  ff. 

TREE  OF  LIFE,  THE  :  105  ff. 
Turgenev,  Ivan:   134 

Untermeyer,    Louis :    13,    22, 
23,  25,  29,  51,  57,  258  ff. 

Waley,  Arthur:  224  ff. 


War  and  Laughter :  53 
Wheelock,  John  Hall:  270 
Whitall,  Arthur:  224 ff. 
Whitman,  Walt:  86,  93,  148, 

172,  188,  263 
WIDOW  IN  THE  BYE  STREET, 

THE:  151 
Wilcox,  Ella  Wheeler :  23,  25, 

232 
Williams,     William     Carlos : 

129,  178  ff.,  268,  283 
WIND   IN   THE   CORN,   THE: 

216  ff. 

WOMENKIND:  199 
Wood,    Clement    Scott :    262, 

265,  270 
Wordsworth,     William :     68, 

77  ff.,  264 
Wyatt,  Edith:  216 ff. 


Of  the  papers  which  compose  this  book  the 
greater  number  have  already  appeared  in  print,  in 
The  Dial,  The  New  Republic,  The  North  Ameri- 
can Review,  The  Poetry  Journal,  and  The  Chi- 
cago Daily  News. 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY,  LOS  ANGELES 

COLLEGE  LIBRARY 

This  book  is  due  on  the  last  date  stamped  below. 


Book  Slip-35m-9,'62(D2218s4)4280 


E21-209 
.50 


College 
Library 


PN 

1271 

A29s 


UCLA-College  Library 

PN  1271  A29s 


L  005  651   159  5 


A     001  105  234     7 


